Crowdsourcing business plans for seasteads

Miscellaneous General
1

Some time ago I was agitated by Anenome’s posts to research feasibility of seasteads. I looked at available technologies, service providers and producers, starting from raw materials (like special foams or basalt rods) to hulls to fully built platforms. I figured there are at least two non-technical issues to be solved before seasteading becomes reality.

One is the legal uncertainty - I could not figure what exact constraints on seasteading apply in the territorial waters, contiguous zone, EEZ, and continental shelf. I understand that the former two are completely off-limits, but even the status of the latter two is quite unclear (e.g., could I just put up a platform in a middle of Dogger Bank without asking the UK? Would they want to regulate or tax me? Would they have a law saying they can?). Also, what about exports from the seastead - what would be their legal status? What kind of taxes/tariffs would apply?

The second issue is lack of estimates of various costs world-wide. I mean, to make a seastead profitable, it must be able to either provide some services prohibited on mainland, or it should compete price-wise. The former option attracts too much attention of the mainland’s authorities, so the latter option looks less risky. Thus, the idea is to crowdsource estimates for energy, transportation, various kinds of labor, and taxes in various parts of the world, in order to come up with the business plan that can compete with the mainland-based business.

As a strawman, consider a business idea of producing salt and distilled water from seawater. Would it be cheaper on sea than on land? Why? Would the tax load on land outweight the added costs of labor, maintanence, and transportation?

2

Straw man? Check this out: Mining seawater for minerals via the production of fresh water:
http://www.ted.com/talks/damian_palin_mining_minerals_from_seawater.html

The Sink or Swim business plan contest put on the by the SI, with the 2nd place winner being what BlueSeed went ahead and did with an offshore living space for immigration problems:
http://www.seasteading.org/community/contests/sink-or-swim-contest-winners/

Here’s a useful link for seasteading businesses as well.

As for flags, there are a number of flags of convenience that could be used, see the SI. The SI is doing the heavy lifting on the legality issues. And they are a lightning rod for investors and those interested in starting a seasteading business.

My own contribution, I hope to begin making cheap yet high quality housing through a combination of monolithic dome tech and room-scale 3D printing. Figure if I can bring the cost of owning a permanent floating structure way down, to under $100k, then societies can take off much faster, and I’d expect to have immediate customers.

I haven’t diligently run the numbers yet, but it looks like I could produce a 2,000 sf floating dome, for around $10k - $20k whole-sale, using a process I’m engineering now which requires virtually no labor to produce the dome itself (in contrast to the current method of making a dome via an airform and using manual labor to apply the various layers and whatnot, which is actually still cheaper than building a traditional home, just my method is cheaper still).

Because a seastead has the luxury of not worrying about zoning laws and living space on the sea isn’t an issue, what I’d actually like to do is start building larger 4,000 sf domes, maybe 5,000 ft, with the idea being that people could put a workshop on the back of the house, so that you’d have both a place to live and a place to work, whatever your trade is, with just a door between them. I think that’d be a dream for a lot of people, fishermen too.

With that in place, there’s a whole lot you can do. Fish in the morning, process in the evening, etc.

3

Thanks for the links, I will study them.

BTW, why a dome shape? I thought it’s quite unstable. As an amateur designer I would imagine an inverted cone is both more stable and is easier to produce. I can understand the choice of the shape if it is crucial for low cost… Ok, maybe you can attach some ballast on a bunch of basalt rods…

Also, isn’t 3D printing cheaper than manual construction only in “very Western” (high cost of living+unions) countries?

4

I say homestead icebergs… terrace the surface, bolt on housing units and mount some steering motors around the water-line. The berg will deteriorate over time so you will have to move onto a new berg at some point. However, as long as you’re not anchoring in the tropics, you should be able to get a decent service life out of each berg and if you choose your super-structure carefully, it should be fairly straightforward to move from berg to berg.

The nice thing about this approach is that the problem of floating is already solved. You don’t have to worry about capsizing, either, as icebergs already have stable buoyancy.

Imagine you are presently on an iceberg and need to transition to a new one. Once you’ve identified a new home iceberg, you bring on some milling equipment (like those asphalt grinders but hand-operated) to terrace the surface. (Note that the terracing may not necessarily be a completely flat surface but, once finished, it should conform to the configuration of the super-structure). To ease the transition process, you might keep some (bolt-together) horizontal beams that can be used as a bridge to temporarily connect the old berg to the new berg. Once the surface has been terraced, you can connect the old and new bergs with the horizontal beams. Once connected, you begin the process of moving over the super-structure one unit at a time. The lowest units are riveted deep into the ice and act as the “foundation” for the rest of the super-structure. These units might be used for food-storage and other storage needs. Then, the super-structure can be moved via winching to the new berg. I’m thinking that an ideal (in terms of utility vs. economics) shell for the super-structure would be those cargo shipping containers.

Finally, you need to transfer the motors from the old iceberg to the new iceberg. I’m thinking that topside mounts that form an inverted-L to allow the motors to reach the water’s surface may be the best bet since you don’t want to have to be trying to drive mounting rivets horizontally into the iceberg from the surface of the water or while rappelling down the side.

You also have other mounting options. You might auger into the ice and concrete-mount some treated wood. This would have the advantage that the mount itself is insulating (unlike a steel rivet which will conduct heat down into the ice, loosening itself.

The other option I like is to buy an old container ship - one of those huuuuuuuuuuge ones - and rent out retrofitted cargo units as quarters. You could have office-space, storage, utility rooms and economy quarters below deck and then “luxury” quarters and office-space above deck. The advantage here is you could stay in warmer climates where people would be naturally attracted… say 200 miles off the coast of Hawaii. The only technical challenges you would need to meet here is to find some kind of safe and economical way to have an offside dock and elevation from the dock.

Personally, I think all the from-scratch seastead ideas are bonkers, at least at this point in time.

Clayton -

5

FWIW, cargo-container homes…

Clayton -

6

The pictures of cargo container homes look better than the name would imply. I still have some reservations about thermal insulation.

7

We use them as motor control centers regularly. You can fully finish the inside with insulation and drywall, like a regular house.

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The thing I like about the cargo-container idea is that I am a huge proponent of being “industry standard” whenever possible - you’re free-riding on the back of all the engineering that went into designing cargo containers to begin with. It’s like lego-bricks… the blocks are already engineered for you, it’s up to you to figure out how to stack them together.

You would need some “utility” units in addition to the rented units. The utility units would facilitate:

  • Horizontal passageways and stairways (spiral?)

  • Utilities: water, electricity, sewage/greywater, ventilation and light-distribution (I’m thinking of “sun pipes”)

Freshwater could be distributed from a “water tower” on deck to reduce pumping costs. Ventilation and daylight could be transported through “sun pipes” that would allow daylight to efficiently travel deep into the bowels of the ship - this would be crucial to avoiding the “prison atmosphere” that characterized Kowloon Walled City, for example.

In particular, I like the idea that the owner of the unit can simply unbolt the damn thing and leave - there’s no issue of getting a deposit or collect for damages if a rental space is ruined. Short of dripping acid onto another tenant’s unit and causing damage to it (or something like that), there’s very little scope for damages since you own your unit and can do whatever you like with it that doesn’t destroy its structural integrity (putting units on top of yours at risk).

One problem I can think of would be how to move units in/out and you might have to maintain service hallways and shafts for this purpose. I’m sure people would want to join units together but I think they would have to keep the units in a way that they can be seperated for installation and then joined once installed into position, kind of like how double-wide or triple-wide modular homes are moved down the highway one segment at a time then joined on-site.

Clayton -

9

What gave you that impression? A dome is actually incredibly strong. You know how archs are inherently strong? A dome is a rotated 360 degree arch. The only force they have to contend with is a flattening tendency, which is countered with both your rebar strategy (wrapping the dome like a barrel is wrapped with metal to contain it from expanding) and the way you anchor it to the ground-surface.

Also, if you were to put two domes together you’d get a sphere, which would be perfect as a floating structure I think.

A cone (pointing up as the walls and roof of the house) isn’t as internally self-supportive as the dome is, and also much less beautiful :stuck_out_tongue:

Manual labor is generally 85% of the cost of building any structure or home. By 3D printing it the internal walls and the like, you can recapture a great deal of that percentage, get labor costs down to perhaps 15% of the cost of a house. That turns into pretty massive savings.

I have built houses for a living in the past, so I know more than a bit about that. I think the potential for 3D printing in this area is pretty massive. There’s already people working on this problem as well, check this out as an example. It’s a machine “printing” a six-foot wall in concrete (~40 second mark):

[view: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-yv-IWdSdns]

What I like about that is the curved aesthetic. I want to create seasteading as a sort of civilization 2.0, the evolution of the human species’ means of living. And part of that is a new seasteading / libertarian visual aesthetic in living spaces, which embraces the curve. Traditionally the curve has been expensive and difficult to produce. But with domes and 3D printing, the curve is as cheap and easy as any other shape.

So take a dome, and imagine hobbit-hole architecture, with not flat vertical walls, but vertically and horizontally curved and curving walls.

And here’s the guy working on printing entire houses. He’s figuring ways to even print plumbing and electrical. That’s pretty huge, that’s a massive expense in a new house.

[view: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ehnzfGP6sq4]

10

What gave you that impression? A dome is actually incredibly strong.

I didn’t mean unstable in structural sense, I meant in “hull stability” sense: http://www.rcwarships.com/rcwarships/nwc/stability.html

Again, thanks for the links. Being a computer programmer and otherwise a geek, seeing the 3D printing on that scale is mindboggling. The possibilities are huge.

11

The iceberg idea isn’t that bad, tbh. I think, if you had enough excess energy, say via nuclear production, that you could just add on to the iceberg via freezing new water onto it.

Also, have you heard of pycrete?

[view: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UMKis4FPykw]

12

Ah, you mean as a hull, gotcha. I thought you meant as the roof / superstructure. The current idea I have is to put the dome on a laterally extended concrete foundation, with I-beams as an internal frame for this foundation. Probably have to waterproof the I-beams with fiberglass first. On the edges of this put some floats all around, and then hang a concrete weight off the center-bottom of the structure a good twenty or thirty feet down. That combination of floats extended laterally as far as possible and a deep weight should give you maximum roll stability on the water and be very comfortable for occupants thereby, I call it a " T " configuration. It is the in-line float and weight systems, a so-called " I " configuration such as the oil rigs use that can be a major, major headache and are very uncomfortable on occupants for all their rolling and listing.

Yeah? What kind of programming do you do? I have need of a programmer for my autarchy concept, and am only just teaching myself basic Python currently. Maybe we can pow-wow :slight_smile:

13

I second the use of shipping containers as structural components. Also check into OTEC or Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion, where you can use the thermal gradient from the surface to the deep, and produce electricity, purified water, cold water, and conceivably also hydrogen.

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I misunderstood you, then. I thought you are gonna use a spherical hull.

I am mostly into “enterprisey” kind of programming, though I dabbed in quite a lot of areas, from 3D graphics to simulations to networking to databases to programming language design to statistics.

What kind of programming you need? :slight_smile:

Feel free to PM.

15

Will do.

Sentcha a friend request, your settings don’t allow random PMs.

16

I understand that part of the benefit of seasteading is mobility, however a lot can go wrong on the water, with that in mind I think a landed seastead marina would be a good lure, but I’m not sure what further legal problems would be created by building a structure up from a relatively shallow ridge in intl waters.

My thought is that the landed structure serves as a safe haven in the event of unforeseen, or underestimated weather/surf problems. It would also be of benefit as a breakwater for the seasteads themselves. I’m sure there would be many services to offer to smaller seasteads. As the community grew maybe the landed structure would grow into being the road between many seasteads.

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@Ragnar: The problem with any dry land is that the “UN mindset” is that all dry land belongs to some official national government or other. (Unfortunately, I think they will do the same to “permanent ocean dwellings” if seasteading ever takes off).

One way around this might be to build an artifical breakwater anchored on an underwater “sea mount”. Since the sea mount is submerged, it’s not dry land and as long as it’s outside of any EEZ, nobody can really claim it under current rules. But there’s always the “Oh, that’s part of our national heritage” crap.

I think if you’re going to do it, you might as well go all the way and float freely. I think that the most conservative/cost-effective approach is to start with existing technology (e.g. a retro-fitted cargo ship) and build out from there. One thing to keep in mind in terms of weather is that because the seastead is always at sea and isn’t necessarily going anywhere in particular, it can stick to areas of the ocean that are calmer and steer around potential storms.

Clayton -

18

Hmm, looks like there already are seasteads. Seems to me if the seastead people are serious, this is where they’d start. Buy one of these, anchor it 30 miles off the coast of San Francisco and start renting units.

Clayton -

19

Here’s what I’m thinking of… a flat deck-barge… mount a crane on this baby and you’re good to go. You don’t even need a super-structure because you’re not going to be navigating anywhere. You can charter a tow boat whenever you need to move from one location to another. Otherwise, just anchor in a nice calm area of ocean and get down to business. One nice thing with the crane is you don’t even need a dock - any ship or craft just pulls up alongside and personnel can move over a flexible bridge while you just load/unload any cargo - even including the craft itself if it’s small enough to stow - with the crane.

This doesn’t have the sex appeal of a Club Stead. But it won’t cost $100M, either. I don’t know what one of those flat decks, crane and any other retrofitting will run you but whatever it is, is peanuts compared to the price tage of a Club Stead.

Clayton -

20

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SWIOnKrv4Mw

Clayton -