Subnostr

Seasteading's technical problems may all be solved... What a time to be alive!

There has been a lot of pessimism around Seasteading technology in recent years, and this sub aims to change that. Even some of the traditional seasteading community's leadership (Patri Friedman & Peter Thiel, to name a couple) would rather invest their money & mindshare in the land-based charter cities, (https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-03-27/prospera-in-honduras-a-private-tech-city-now-open-for-business) under government permission, than to continue working on the only sane branch of research into true freedom & startup societies.

Right now, today, should be the most exciting time to be a seasteader! In recent years we've had an explosion of 3D printing technology worldwide, which makes fabricating most of what we need for daily life aboard a seastead nearly effortless. The problem of where to get most of our 'stuff' is solved with a simply $170 printer and spools of plastic. Then there's the 3 traditional problems holding seasteading back, but as of 2021, all 3 have solid, available, technical solutions for the first time in history!

These 3 tech problems were:

* Income Generation

* Power Generation

* Internet Connection

For the sake of this post please consider older technical problems like miniaturized Spar technology fully solved. Elwar's XLII proved spar tech on a single-family home scale, and if we simply put a bunch of those spars under a seasteading city, reliable flotation won't be a problem. Desalinization and even food farming in the deep (https://atlasofthefuture.org/project/aquapod-fish-farm) are also being done at large scale industrially already, but the 3 big tech problems above seemed too daunting for many seasteaders until this year. -And we have Satoshi Nakamoto & Elon Musk to thank for them being solved today.

Generating Income

Income Generation was the biggest showstopper we had. You'll find many threads on the old seaasteading forum talking about it. It's not enough to just fish and farm what we eat out there; who wants to work every day and still be basically poor? We needed a solution to power international trade... To make us so profitable, in fact, that we can become a rich, desirable place and attract tourists for even more trade.

Well it turns out that seasteaders have had the perfect technology to do exactly that for years now and few have even considered it. It's called Bitcoin Mining.

It turns out that bitcoin mining is the best tech in the world - by far - for capturing stranded energy and turning it into money. This in turn incentivizes more Solar and Wind power. What will we be making out there if not stranded energy?

Also important for seasteading; Mining rigs put off a lot of heat that is perfect for Desalinizing water! All we'd need to do is design a water-tight enclosure to catch the mining rig's heat in a pipe that seawater moves through, and steam will pour out the other end on an industrial scale! This tech was simply tailor-made for our needs.

Of course to power all those energy-hungry mining rigs we'd need to solve the #2 problem:

Power Generation

Generating electricity is something that many of us have imagined each rooftop would do via solar panels &/or windmills to power the home below it. And that still may be the case, but there are many energy needs in a city that require far more power. Clearly we'd need larger platforms to catch far more photons. Arrays like this one (https://interestingengineering.com/hurricane-resistant-floating-solar-farm-lower-fossil-fuel) are a perfect test pilot for generating more energy than rooftops ever could and powering not just factories, but the bitcoin mining plant as well. Windmill farms at sea were already practical for the small scale (https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/so-what-exactly-floating-offshore-wind) and can help displace the energy deficiency from a lack of photons at night. OTEC plants (thermal energy) are currently operating (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_thermal_energy_conversion) in most every large body of water now as well, and those never stop generating energy around the clock. Where oil isn't readily available, imagine a small city powered by all three.

Tesla's solar panels (https://www.tesla.com/solarpanels) and powerwall (https://www.tesla.com/powerwall) batteries are the key, IMHO, to making all of this varied energy affordable. They're already set up to take photons from your roof as well as grid energy and store them while they're abundant to use when you need them. Our needs are exactly like that, but our grid will look a bit different. Anyone with the money to invest could start up a new solar plant or windmill farm and attach it to the seastead, and it would make a lot of sense to do so considering that there is no cost for real estate out in the deep! Remember, the number one cost for a land-based solar farm is the land.

Let that part sink in: even if your seastead grows in size rapidly, you can always grow & keep your solar farm or windmills floating out away from the city, connected by only a cable. Your free, nearly-infinite land can even move relative to the city center in order to accommodate for more city growth!

Internet connection

There are many reasons a Seastead needs a good connection to the internet. Keeping in touch with family and friends is a major use of it, as is entertainment, and of course working from home has become commonplace in the last couple of years. However, I'd argue that communications with the press is a real biggie for pioneering seasteaders because a livestream of the attackers on CNN is probably the best deterrent we could have from nationstate attacks. (Ok, torpedoes might be better but that'll have to come later.)

Bitcoin mining requires a low-latency connection to remain competitive, as well. We already had Blockstream's satellites (https://blockstream.com/satellite/) to propagate the blocks and keep us on the network anywhere in the world, but this isn't enough to stay profitable... Those satellites are in a high geostationary orbit and every 10 minutes a new race for the next block must be run to earn the coins. Latency is huge here.

Thankfully uncle Elon came to the rescue here too and his new Starlink satellites (https://www.starlink.com) are rolling out now with extremely low latency. They're so fast that you can do competitive gaming over them!

So as you can see, seasteading's largest problems have been solved already, and commercial products are available to purchase now. It's nearly time to finally get a real, serious attempt at a deep-sea seastead off the ground, just while bitcoiners are becoming rich enough to afford it!

Replying to Beiner

I aint never seen racks on racks and I'm not ashamed to say that I've never seen 10k or 6k in one stack. I come from the hood but I never had luck with money never ever did.. ahh just venting. Life is hard when you never had a lump sum to put ahead 😕