Subnostr

I've been interested in living on a boat for some time now, and as I've learned more about it, I think I've found an undeveloped market niche. I don't have the capital or expertise to exploit it, but I might benefit a lot from someone else doing it... So here it is...

Offshore moorings. Its a developed industry for energy projects, but appears to be completely absent for pleasure boaters or fishermen.

When you tally up the cost of living on a boat - even a modest boat - it gets ridiculous pretty fast. You need slip space, which is charged per foot, and electricity and probably showers and internet and fuel and water. Getting food probably means paying for a ride. And the harbors are tightly controlled by government and have pseudo monopolies, operating in an advantaged position of a somewhat captive market.

Well... F that. We could open this up to competition by putting some pilings in open water and floating some segments between them to create a deployable lagoon. Obviously there are technical details which I don't know, but if we can make oil rigs, we can make artificial harbors too.

Something I think about a lot is just how much open space there is at sea. It's hard to wrap my mind around it. On land, we get the impression that humanity is spreading over everything like a fungus, but that's not really true - we're using a small fraction of the land and almost never venture out to the unbuilt-upon land. The oceans are entirely unused. And states seem to fear the ocean - shipping lanes can be patrolled because they're as one dimensional as possible. The vast expanse beyond the narrow lanes is wild. Raw nature. Practically infinite in all directions. If you took everything humans have ever built and put it in the Pacific Ocean and then forgot where you left it, you'd never be able to find it again. Its that big...

We could build a breakaway civilization from deployable artificial harbors.... Offshore moorings. Or just make boat life a lot more affordable. Maybe.

#boats #sea #boatlife #business #earth #civilization #freedom

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Discussion

ᴛʜᴇ ᴅᴇᴀᴛʜ ᴏꜰ ᴍʟᴇᴋᴜ 1y ago

if you can find places to make offshore moorings i'm sure you can make money out of it... i mean offshore as in "outside of the jurisdiction of an established government navy"

the hard part is facilitating those essential services, food supply, water, power, etc

i think one of the ways to approach this is to think outside the box on solutions especially energy and heating

the rest is ordinary transport problems, but power, and its use cases, imply a different way of solving the problem out in the seas than throwing wires around, much more practical to talk about fuels, generators, powerplants and other suchlikes

choke_this 1y ago

With enough energy, all of those problems are solvable.

Comte de Sats Germain 1y ago

Most power needs can be supplied by OTEC - ocean thermal energy conversion. And there's also solar, which is cheap enough already to probably be enough all by itself. Energy storage, I've always felt that we overcomplicate... On land, a large weight could be lifted to store energy, then let down to use the energy. Tall buildings should have this... At sea, a water tank at the top of each piling could do the same job. It might synergize with otec quite well - idk, just a suspicion.

Likewise, fresh water accumulation needn't be as complicated as we make it currently. I've often imagined a sort of floating alembic to gather fresh water via evaporation. There's all sorts of unexplored directions for that.

The potential money makers at sea are potentially (am I over using this word?) huge. Algae farms making diesel and methane can power the solar system. Like, the whole thing... Methane for methalox fuel and diesel for heavy machinery. OTEC offers enough energy to be competitive mining bitcoin. Much more than enough. Mariculture can easily produce enough food for the entire world, even a world with multiple times current population. Really, its a crime that we aren't using our oceans. Its absurd...

ᴛʜᴇ ᴅᴇᴀᴛʜ ᴏꜰ ᴍʟᴇᴋᴜ 1y ago

yeah, OTEC is complicated though, and it is essentially a turbine powered by a thermocline, it more or less could be said to be a variant of chimmney effect

but i generally agree, there is some awesome things you could do with floating settlements. i just think that you need to calculate in the potential of tidal movements that are more than 1SD outside of the range of recorded history, at least, this changes the equation of how you do it, a lot, like what happens if a bunch of tethered floating things suddenly need to spend a week or two sitting on the sand more or less directly under them, leveling them is gonna be a big problem... just one example... can you fx that with some kind of adaptable multi-leg prop system somehow, idk what would be required, tbh, it's a big problem

and what happens if your tethers put your vessels under water in a short term rise of water?

personally, i think the equations are simpler to solve if you are simply at 2km altitude or higher, the chances of water pushing your breathing level more than a kilometer further is nearly zero, at all, but in the sea, i think 2sd over the usual tidal movement is feasible boundaries for design

Comte de Sats Germain 1y ago

Could be wrong, but I think most of the ocean is deeper than high elevation land is high. Regardless, piles solve waves. A pile is a vertical thingy that floats in the water. The waves can do whatever they want, it just bobs up and down. A long horizontal thingy, like a barge, would get wrecked by waves applying force in different places, like holding a stick with both hands and kicking it. So with the pile, there must be some ratio of pile mass to attached mass that can be attached without endangering the structure with horizontal-ness. And if it gets really crazy, detach whatever is attached to the pile, and bring it back when the storm is done. Just an idea. Anyways, I think it's doable.

ᴛʜᴇ ᴅᴇᴀᴛʜ ᴏꜰ ᴍʟᴇᴋᴜ 1y ago

it basically a heavy mass with a particular anisotropy

it absorbs a lot of force in all directions but especially up and down

the thing is this doesn't address the problem that your things in between need to tolerate maybe as much as 100m of immersion and there needs to be a warning system that alerts the dwellers to enter and seal up for this case

as i see it, this is more practical with a tunnel burrowed into solid volcanic rock, at a high altitude, where you don't have to adapt to anything but merely need to breathe for a few weeks while everything is locked down

that's basically the countermeasure i see as most effective, unless you have gravity control and then all bets are off, a lot of things change in their difficulty because you can wrap a space in zero mass

choke_this 1y ago

Yeah I don’t think weights or water is very good for energy storage in this scenario. It works if you have large reservoirs with hundreds or thousands of feet elevation, but it has very little capacity on small scales.

Comte de Sats Germain 1y ago

There are other options available. Maybe store energy by heating something up. Or just accept that you won't be running all the gadgets for some hours of the day. I actually do think weights will work fine - it would just take more weight if you hang it under the structure, due to buoyancy.

choke_this 1y ago

Modular reactor….maybe dual reactors for backup and refueling

Comte de Sats Germain 1y ago

Too easy. I need it to be more difficult.

choke_this 1y ago

🤣🤣🤣

choke_this 1y ago

The reason nuclear is so expensive is the liability and government. No government = lower cost nukes

gojiberra 1y ago

I have definitely browsed the sailboat listing pages a few times.

I just think I'm too lazy tbh.

But I think the harbors, old cities, and other countries would be the draw...

Comte de Sats Germain 1y ago

Yeah, stuff to do definitely makes some harbors more appealing. I was just thinking about how to break the near monopoly that those locations have. And I'm looking for any angle to get us out colonizing new shit again.