Seasteading 101

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Recently, I was sucked into the website, http://seasteading.org and spent the better part of a morning learning about this extremely ambitious project.

According to the description offered on the site, “Seasteading is creating permanent dwellings on the ocean – homesteading the high seas.”

Using an “open-source” argument to explain how and why we should consider developing this type of society and community, the Seasteading Institute makes excellent points in the rationalization of their mission.  It, they maintain, is no different than a cruise ship, completely self-contained, autonomous, and providing all the nessecities for sustaining life on the open water, including a high degree of comfort and ammenities as well.  The difference being that these cities would be “permanent” in the sense that they would be located either by anchoring to the sea floor or held in place using a GPS-based positioning system.  To circumvent the issues of political and sovereignty control, a plan to adopt a flag of convenience to provide autonomy from government control.

Lest you think that this idea is yet another wacky, ill-conceived pie-in-the-sky fantasy you should realize that this concept has legs in the fact that it recently received $500,000 of initial funding from Peter Thiel, who is co-founder of PayPal amongst other notable investors.  It has been covered extensively in the technology and science press, and their website is an amazingly organized and information-packed guide to the mission.

The site really becomes a study in creating an idea, putting the idea out into the public domain, then allowing the idea to generate its own further conception.  A particularly interesting facet of the site is the Engineering forum. Here, you read, see,  and feel the excitement a project of this magnitude is capable of inspiring.  Additionally, some very thought-provoking ideas are presented using prototype drawings of  various designs for the communities.  There are over 1300 posts discussing structural design alone.

The latest press release issued from the Seasteading Institute (5/18/2009) announces the winner of the first Seasteading Architectural Design Contest. András Gyõrfi won $1000.00 for his submission which is shown above.

We constantly emphasize space exploration in our culture now and rightly so… its contribution to technological advances and its importance to our development as a human race is paramount, however, projects such as the seasteading concept create an important goal in and of itself: our world is finite in terms of our ability to manage the resources we are given and limited to here on Earth.  Using our engineering know-how to create a better and more efficient use of these resources is a short-term challenge that brings immediate life-sustaining solutions to our society today.