Apple iCloud VS SafeNetwork
Bitcoinist Interview with Nick Lambert from MaidSafe. Discussing privacy issues, decentralization and Sea-Steading.
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Category Archives: Sea steading
Peter Thiel: the billionaire tech entrepreneur on a mission to cheat death
Thiel, whose net worth is reported to be $2.2 billion, is Silicon Valley royalty, and a singular figure even in that rarefied world. He is a gay practising Christian, a libertarian who has thrown money and support behind the political campaigns of the Republican John McCain and the Libertarian Ron Paul, and who sits on the steering committee of the Bilderberg Group the elite band of the rich and powerful from politics, industry and business that convenes each year to discuss nobody-outside-the-inner-circle-quite-knows-what. Above all, he is a man with a utopian belief in the power of technology to change the world.
Through a variety of venture capital funds and his non-profit Thiel Foundation, Thiel has invested substantially in space travel, artificial intelligence, biotechnology and information technology. He has been one of the most public champions of seasteading the idea of establishing floating communities outside territorial waters and beyond the regulatory powers of governments. His Thiel Fellowship programme encourages clever people under the age of 20 to forgo a college education and start their own companies. And he has poured millions of dollars into what he calls the immortality project. I would like to live longer, and I would like other people to live longer. His belief is such that he has signed up with Alcor, the leading company in the field of cryogenics, to be deep-frozen at the time of his death as much as an ideological statement, he says, as in any expectation of being thawed out any time in the near future. In telling you that Ive signed up for it [cryogenics], theres always this reaction that its really crazy, its disturbing. But my take on it is its only disturbing because it challenges our complacency.
Peter Thiels fortunes may rest largely in Silicon Valley, but he lives and works in San Francisco. His office is in a low-slung building in the Presidio, the national park close to the Golden Gate Bridge, which is also home to George Lucass film business. Thiels offices house his hedge-fund business, one of his venture capital funds and the Thiel Foundation. Founders Fund, the venture capital firm that he runs with six partners, is in a neighbouring building. Thiels home, in the Marina district overlooking the ocean, is a five-minute drive away. He also owns a home in Maui, Hawaii.
Thiel has invited me to join him for breakfast, prepared by his own chef, which we eat in a glass-walled conference room. Thiel is of medium height, stocky in build, and moves like a man who, even at the age of 46, has not quite got used to his body. He has come from a run he does a three- or four-mile jog two or three times a week, and enjoys hiking and surfing and is dressed in a T-shirt, chinos and trainers. He is eating an egg-white spinach omelette Im on a crazy diet, he grumbles. I am eating a cheese omelette with the yolk left in, a side of bacon and a bowl of fruit, at which he occasionally throws covetous glances.
Almost the first thing Thiel does after we have been introduced is to ask what are the three most interesting things Ive encountered in the past year. He might learn something new, he explains, and it gives me a better idea of the kind of things you might want to explore.
Peter is very different from most people in Silicon Valley, Luke Nosek, one of the co-founders of PayPal, and now on the Founders Fund board, told me. With a lot of people the conversation is about how are we going to make more money; with Peter the conversation is How are we going to figure this out? He has a tremendous curiosity about how the world works, and all the philosophical and moral questions around that. Another colleague evaluated his ability for casual bar talk as very low. The ability to recall a data point what was gold trading at on day five of the Second World War and what was the impact of that? He has it like a record-book.
Thiel was born in Frankfurt, Germany, in 1967, the son of an engineer who moved his family to America when Thiel was one, eventually settling in Foster City, California. He has a younger brother, Patrick. Growing up, Thiel displayed all the traits of the brilliant, slightly nerdish loner.
He was a fanatical chess-player, becaming one of the highest ranked under-21 players in America; an avid reader of science fiction Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein in particular. He played Dungeons and Dragons, and was obsessed with Tolkien; two of Thiels businesses are named after Tolkien references: a technology investment fund Mithril (a precious metal found in Middle-earth) and Palantir, his data analytics company, named after the seeing stones in The Lord of the Rings.
Thiel studied philosophy at Stanford University before going on to Stanford Law School, and working in a law firm in New York and then as a derivatives trader on Wall Street. None of this quite answered what he describes as his world-changing aspirations.
The seed of Thiels libertarian beliefs was sown at Stanford. He founded a student newspaper, The Stanford Review, and co-authored a book, The Diversity Myth, attacking political correctness on campus. And he read Solzhenitsyn and Ayn Rand, the eccentric Russian author whose advocacy of ferocious laissez-faire capitalism, and her celebration of the heroic, individualistic genius fighting against bureaucratic regulation, made her something of a patron saint among the entrepreneurs of Silicon Valley. The charismatic founder is a characteristic of many Silicon Valley start-ups, Thiel says, but you need a whole team to get things done.
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Peter Thiel: the billionaire tech entrepreneur on a mission to cheat death
Sea Steading Infomercial – Video
Seasteading | Online Only | n+1
Ephemerisle, 2009. Photo by Liz Henry via flickr.
To get to Ephemerisle, the floating festival of radical self-reliance, I left San Francisco in a rental car and drove east through Oakland, along the California Delta Highway, and onto Route 4. I passed windmill farms, trailer parks, and fields of produce dotted with multicolored Porta Potties. I took an accidental detour around Stockton, a municipality that would soon declare bankruptcy, citing generous public pensions as a main reason for its economic collapse. After rumbling along the gravely path, I reached the edge of the SacramentoSan Joaquin River Delta. The delta is one of the most dredged, dammed, and government subsidized bodies of water in the region. Its estimated that it provides two-thirds of Californians with their water supply.
At the marina closest to the festival, I spotted a group of Ephemerislers in swimsuits crammed into a dinghy. I approached them, but they were uninterested in small talk: their engine had run out of gas, and the marina was all out, too. They could give me a ride, they said, if I tracked down fuel. I contemplated the sad marina, its shabby rental boats, the murky water. Almost an hour had passed when the festivals ferry service showed up. At around noon, six of us took off in a small motorboat, speeding past Venice Island, a private sliver of land where Barron Hilton, heir to the Hilton hotel fortune, hunts ducks and puts on an annual July 4th firework display. Five minutes later, Ephemerisle came into sight, bobbing gently in an area called the Mandeville Tip.
It looked, at first, like a shapeless pile of floating junk, but as the boat drew closer, a sense of order emerged. The island was made up of two rows of houseboats, anchored about a hundred feet apart, with a smaller cluster of boats and yachts set off to the west. The boats had been bound together with planks, barrels, cleats, and ropes, assembled ad-hoc by someone with at least a rudimentary understanding of knots and anchors. Residents decorated their decks with banners and flags and tied kayaks and inflatable toys off the sides, giving the overall landscape the cephalopodan quality of raver pants. Dirty socks and plastic dishes and iPads and iPhones littered the decks. An enormous sound system blasted dance music, it turned out, at all hours of the day.
Each of the two-dozen boats at the party had a nameBayesian Conspiracy, Snuggly Nemo, Magic Carpet, Mini-ocracyand each name a personality to match, conveyed by the resident boaters choice of drug, beverage, or degree of exhibitionism. When I arrived, the Ephemerislers were partying in various stages of undress. They had been encouraged to make the space their own, to mind their own business, and to do as they pleased. This was, after all, a celebration of the laissez-faire lifean escape from the oppressive, rule-bound grind of dry land. In this suspended, provisional unreality, everybody was a planner, an economist, a designer, a king. Attendees were ready for everything the elements had in store, but knew escape was just a few clicks away, should the experiment go terribly wrong.
It is apparently a coincidence that Ephemerisles location shared a name with the 16th-century proto-libertarian philosopher Bernard de Mandeville. Mandeville Tip is a breezy point in the middle of the Delta, flanked by levees and a short boat ride away from a former county park. Its named after a 19th-century Californian politician, J. W. Mandeville, but the more well-known Mandeville, of the Fable of the Bees, had much in common with Ephemerisles freewheeling spirit. The Fables most famous lines, cited by Keynes, come from Mandevilles poem entitled The Grumbling Hive: or, Knaves turnd Honest, which argues that allowing private vices makes for good public policy. Bare Virtue cant make Nations live / In Splendor; they, that would revive / A Golden Age, must be as free / For Acorns, as for Honesty, concludes Mandeville, after bemoaning the unhappiness and lack of prosperity the bees experience while living in a more wholesome, regulated hive. Ephemerisle was its own little beehive of decadence, a floating pillow fort saturated in sex and soft drugs. It billed itself as a gathering of people interested in the possibility of permanent experimental ocean communities, but felt more like Burning Man, if Burners frolicked in the tears of Ludwig Von Mises.
Ephemerisle got its libertarian streak from its founders: the event was originally conceived of by the Seasteading Institute, a San Francisco nonprofit that supports the creation of thousands of floating city-states in international waters. After overseeing the first Ephemerisle in 2009, the Institute handed over responsibility for the festival to the community in 2010it turns out a raucous floating party costs too much for a tiny think tank to insureand last year, the group consisted of 300 amateur boaters, intoxicated partiers, and a committed clan of Seasteaders.
Seasteaders made up about a quarter of Ephemerisles attendees. If they took the operation somewhat more seriously than the young Californians who came just to party and build things, its because they dream of a day when theyll have their pick of floating city-states to live on, work from, and eventually abandon in favor of a different platform when they get bored. Borrowing from the lexicon of evolution, the Seasteaders say that a Cambrian explosion of these new countries will bring about greater freedom of choice for individuals, stimulate competition between existing governments, and provide blank nation-slates for experiments in governance. Ephemerisle is supposed to distill the ambitious project into a weekend that would give people the direct experience of political autonomy. It combines its political ambitions with appeals to back-to-the-land survivalism, off-the-grid drug use, and a vague nostalgia for water parks. There are no tickets, no central organizers, no rules, no rangers to keep you safe, reads the Ephemerisle mission statement. Its a new adventure into an alien environment, with discoveries, adventures, and mishaps along the way.
I was dropped off on the North neighborhoodthe most raucous of the threewhich, in addition to a row of houseboats, had a big platform serving as a communal front yard. One of the boats had pirated a radio station, Radio FMerisle. Other boats had tents pitched on their roofs to accommodate boatless hangers-on. It was a vision straight out of Neal Stephensons cult sci-fi novel Snow Crash (1992), which turned out to be one of the most influential texts in the Seasteading communitybeloved for its dystopian portrayals of life in a virtual, post-statist society. Small pleasure craft, sampans, junk, dhows, dinghies, life rafts, houseboats, makeshift structures built on air-filled oil drums and slabs of styrofoam, wrote Stephenson two decades ago, describing an itinerant flotilla full of refugees called The Raft. A good fifty percent of it isnt real boat material at all, just a garble of ropes, cables, planks, nets, and other debris tied together on top of whatever kind of flotsam was handy.
As I hopped from boat to boat and onto the platform, I noticed many of the men in attendance had sparkly turquoise polish on their grubby toenails. On one of the houseboats, a body-painting session was in full swing, but the hot California sun quickly reduced the painted swirls to an eczemic crust. Within minutes, I overheard an endless stream of conversations about start-ups, incubators, hackerspaces and apps. Naked bodies ambled by. While looking for a bathroom, I walked in on a couple having sex in a houseboats aft cabin.
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Earl puts UK tourist mountain up for sale
(CNN) -
The $3 million price tag might be steep, but so is the property -- an entire mountain in the beautiful English Lake District.
Blencathra, a bleak curve-backed summit overlooking the northern end of one Britain's most popular national parks, has been put up for sale by its current owner to pay a tax bill.
"We went through the pictures and furniture first," Hugh Lowther told the Daily Telegraph newspaper.
Lowther is the eighth Earl of Lonsdale, whose family has owned Blencathra for four centuries.
Lowther said despite offloading an artwork by Joseph Turner, Britain's most popular landscape painter, looming debts left him looking elsewhere.
"We sold a Turner for 1.4 million ($2.37 million), a derelict farm steading and a couple of cottages which were vacant. And now Blencathra."
Reaching 868-meters above sea level, the mountain comprises six separate "tops" and is often referred to locally as "saddleback."
'Unique investment opportunity'
The mountain's rugged moss-covered flanks attract hikers from around the world.
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Property comes with lordship
(CNN) -
The $3 million price tag might be steep, but so is the property -- an entire mountain in the beautiful English Lake District.
Blencathra, a bleak curve-backed summit overlooking the northern end of one Britain's most popular national parks, has been put up for sale by its current owner to pay a tax bill.
"We went through the pictures and furniture first," Hugh Lowther told the Daily Telegraph newspaper.
Lowther is the eighth Earl of Lonsdale, whose family has owned Blencathra for four centuries.
Lowther said despite offloading an artwork by Joseph Turner, Britain's most popular landscape painter, looming debts left him looking elsewhere.
"We sold a Turner for 1.4 million ($2.37 million), a derelict farm steading and a couple of cottages which were vacant. And now Blencathra."
Reaching 868-meters above sea level, the mountain comprises six separate "tops" and is often referred to locally as "saddleback."
'Unique investment opportunity'
The mountain's rugged moss-covered flanks attract hikers from around the world.
Continued here:
FAQ – The Seasteading Institute | The Seasteading Institute
Our first response to this question is the same things anyone else does, but maybe we dont get out enough. As long as seasteads have an Internet connection, it might take us a while to notice that we are on a small, isolated platform in the middle of the ocean. To be fair, not everyone plugs in this way.
Our the next-simplest response is to point out lifestyles similar to those found on land that would be compatible with life aboard a seastead. For example, vacationers will be able to do pretty much anything they can do on a cruise ship in addition to whatever unique activities might be offered aboard the seastead. Resort employees on a seastead will find it much like working on a cruise ship.
In terms of permanent residents, the seasteading experience will be more like that of people who live in isolated, rural areas, or live-aboard boaters. While such a life does not appeal to everyone, the people who like it rarely seem to be bored. Furthermore, permanent residents can always take a vacation on land if they crave a setting with more people. The closer a seastead is to land, the easier it becomes to visit to a nearby major city for a day or weekend. This opportunity makes seasteading even more like just living in the outback, and is one of many reasons a coaststead seems like a good place to start.
The key to success will be to leverage the uniqueness of seasteads. If that only appeals to a tiny fraction of the world, thats still plenty of people. Seasteads and islands will each have their own kind of romance. Each will appeal to a different set of peopleas long as we can find enough people who think seasteads are romantic, it doesnt matter if some prefer islands. Niche markets are not necessarily a bad thing in business, particularly if they arent served well by other options have a large enough customer base.
Also, since modular seasteads will be able to float and move, dynamic geography will be possible. Our central thesis about why societies on the ocean will work better than those on land is that freedom of movement of individual modules allows for the separation and merging of seasteading clusters, creating a process of continual improvement.
Finally, political and social institutions matter. There is a reason that most people who can afford it choose to live in the first world, even though oceanfront property in the third world, where institutions suffer many problems, is both cheaper and more beautiful. If we can provide an innovative society with efficient government services, productive people will flock to it as a place to live and work.
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Seastead – Seasteading
From Seasteading
A seastead is a structure which is safe to live on in international waters. The goal is to enable dynamic geography where people can pick which legal system they are in without having to box up their stuff and change houses. Since the focus is on living on the water, not getting anywhere quickly or carrying heavy cargo, a seastead design can sacrifice speed through the water and cargo capacity to achieve lower costs per square foot and greater stability than a boat/yacht/ship of similar price. The goal of seasteading is to make a community of people living on affordable seasteads.
There are several different lines of thinking about what seasteads should look like and the best strategies to get them built. The table below shows the main visions for what we should be working on to advance seasteading.
Note that the above approaches are not mutually exclusive, except in the sense that if you spend your time and money on one you don't have it to spend on another.
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Seasteading: Sustainable Solution to Offshore Platforms: Urban …
(Image: Andrs Gyrfi, cc-3.0)
Seasteading the concept of creating autonomous communities at sea offers a sustainable solution to dealing with abandoned oil rigs and other redundant offshore platforms. In theory, seasteads would be established beyond the territories claimed by national governments, and some would even be mobile. As eccentric as it sounds, theres a substantial movement to make this form of oceanic dwelling a realityby 2014.
(Image: Richard Lazenby, public domain)
The term can be traced to the works of two people Ken Neumeyer and Wayne Gramlich and proposals range from refitted cruise ships and adapted oil rigs to decommissioned anti-aircraft platforms and custom-built floating islands. To date, no autonomous states exist on the high seas that are recognised as sovereign nations, although the Principality of Sealand(above) a disputed micronation located on an abandoned sea fort near the UK coast might disagree.
(Image: via JackDayton, cc-3.0)
Various other seasteading proposals have been put forward, including spar platforms and modular islands. In 2009, the Seasteading Institute patented a design for a 200-person resort called ClubStead, equivalent in size to a city block. With a focus on community, the Institute hopes to launch the first seastead in San Francisco Bay in 2014. Despite the legal issues, the concept at least presents an sustainable means of dealing with abandoned sea platforms in a community driven environment.
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Seasteading: Sustainable Solution to Offshore Platforms: Urban ...
Seasteading And Sovereignety – Exposing The Truth
What do Hong Kong, Singapore, and Lichtenstein all have in common? They are home to 3 of the most free and most prosperous economies in the world. They are some of the highest ranked in terms of income and standard of living. With unemployment rates at 3.3%, 1.9%, and 1.5%, they seem to have delivered a knockout blow to poverty by simply allowing almost maximum freedom in the realm of economic behavior of their citizens.
So why hasnt every other country followed suite and adopted policies that advance human freedom? The simple answer is that almost every government in the world is trending towards becoming bigger and more invasive into peoples lives, telling free people what they can say, when they can gather and protest, how and with what can they protect themselves, etc.. Even in Singapore, there are major policies restraining personal freedom, with drug crimes even potentially carrying a death sentence.
Out of this trend, a movement has been sparked called Seasteading.The concept calls for the building of sovereign dwellings in the ocean, outside the jurisdictional reach of any nation. The 3 places mentioned above represent what proponents hope to emulate in their sea based communities. A Thousand floating Hong Kongs is how it is described in a promo video by The Seasteading Institute (TSI). TSI was formed in 2008 by Wayne Gramlich and Patri Friedman (Grandson of Nobel Prize Winning Economist Milton Friedman, and son of economist David Friedman) as an organization to help facilitate the establishment of the actual dwellings.
Founder of Paypal, Peter Thiel, has invested millions already toward the TSI in an effort to help the floating-city project come to reality. Thiel has stated thathe thinks sea colonization is an important step in securing mankinds future on Earth. Seasteading is essentially homesteading, rather its location is on the sea. A quick review of homesteading: the initiation of establishing a life-style of self-sufficiency.
When in international waters, these dwellings would be able to create their own legal systems, in effect creating competition among small, sovereign societies. Cruise ships currently take advantage of international law, as they are not tied to any one countrys laws, and they are essentially floating cities that provide everything that people need for weeks at a time. While the founders of TSI are libertarian in their beliefs, the intent is not to establish libertarian societies per se, but to allow competition, with people picking which Seasteading community fits their needs and wants. It is just as possible to have a sovereignstead, another for communist/socialist Seastead, and another for libertarians, muslims, etc. Projects and products succeed which receive the most votes: every dollar a consumer spends is a vote.
The biggest obstacle for TSI and others who hope to see functioning Seasteading operationsin the future seems to be the capital intensive nature of constructing the platforms. One possible solution could be cruise ships being retrofitted to become fully legitimate Seasteads themselves. This idea is being planned to an extent by a group called Blue Seed. The group is working towards building a start-up community for entrepreneurs, it is designed for foreigners who dont have a US work visa, and it will be located 12 nautical miles off the coast of San Francisco, in international waters.
The purpose is to bring entrepreneurs close to technology hot spots without putting them into a specific national legal framework. To some, this idea is utopic or dangerous, and therefore should not be taken seriously. But this kind of skeptical thinking has not stopped man from creating incredible technologies that have altered and improved the livesof people for generations. So will you criticize what seems unrealistic, or will you be daring enough to dream?
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Vision/Strategy | The Seasteading Institute
At The Seasteading Institute, we work to enable seasteading communities floating cities which will allow thenext generation of pioneers to peacefully test new ideas for government. The most successful can then inspire change in governments around the world.
This is an audacious vision that will take decades to fully realize. We strongly believe in incrementalism breaking this huge vision down into manageable, practical steps. Our current strategy centers around the Floating City Project, through which we are crafting practical plans for the worlds first seastead, designed around the needs of actual potential residents, and located within a host nations protected, territorial waters.
We believe the first key step is for seasteading to become not just possible, but sustainable technologically,legally, and financially.
In other words, the cost of living on the ocean must be low enough, and the business opportunities promising enough, such that there is an economic incentive for people to live on seasteads. Currently, the high cost of open ocean engineering serves as a large barrier to entry, and hinders entrepreneurship in international waters. This has led us to look for cost-reducing solutions within the territorial waters of a host nation, while still remaining dedicated to the goal of obtaining political autonomy for governmental experiments. Therefore, our plan entails negotiating with a host nation for maximum autonomy for a seastead in exchange for the economic and social benefits it could provide. This will allow for a proof-of-concept, and will hopefully spawn many more experiments with floating cities around the world, including those further offshore, and under different legal arrangements.
The Seasteading Institute has built a program which supports the strategic objective of sustainable seasteading (as defined above), primarily focusing on planning and facilitating the first floating city.
As a non-profit organization, our role is not to build seasteads ourselves, but to set the stage in order to empower others to do so. Our Floating City Project is the latest form of business development it explores a model wherein a single company comprising several stakeholders will oversee construction and management of a highly autonomous floating city, leaving residents and entrepreneurs free to operate their own lives and businesses. The project builds on years of engineering and legal research, political and related maritime industry diplomacy, and the building of a community of aspiring seasteaders.
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What is Seasteading? – Marine Insight
Regarded to be a major revolutionary spectacle, seasteading refers to development alternate nations and societies on the oceanic domain. The initiatives origins can be traced back to as early as the start of the 1980s though it was only during the early 21st century that firm steps were taken to bring this visualised fantasy to life.
The concept of sea steading originated as a means of relocating to other feasible geographies so as to evade the problems and threats caused by contemporary societal and inter and intra-national conflicts.
Seasteading thus also involves constructing viable and workable structures that will allow the new-age citizens to combine healthy lifestyles of both work and pleasures, just like any other land-based avenue. Such a structure that would house the citizens is thus referred to as a seastead.
Seasteading Institute
Founded in the year 2008, the Seasteading Institute has been developed as a unilateral establishment to assimilate all possible developmental avenues to come up with viable seastead models. Along with being pioneered by two exceptional visionaries, the Institute also possess the financial backing of a groundbreaking businessman Peter Thiel.
Based upon the Seasteading Institutes findings and analyses, the following have been highlighted to successfully bring the sea steading idea to realisation:
- Using ships as seastead colonies. Their hugeness of size and their optimum feasibility even otherwise makes them an ideal choice for seasteading.
- Using poles not dissimilar to drilling rigs in the high seas as sea steading colonies. The poles would provide the required base support required to maintain the colonies stability while on water.
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Designing the World’s First Floating City | Indiegogo
Designing the World's First Floating City
For five years, our nonprofit The Seasteading Institutehas been conducting research into the potential for seasteads permanent, innovative communities floating at sea. We are now using the knowledge base within our network to develop an actual floating city, the first of its kind.
Thousands of potential residents have joined our community. Hundreds have filled out our initial survey at floating-city.org. We are developing their input into a plan to fulfill the specific needs and desires of residents and business owners. After the preliminary report is released in 2014, we will facilitate collaboration between potential residents, developers, and investors, to actualize the plan.
Our geopolitical and oceanographic experts are investigating practical locations for a free city at sea. Inhabitants of the city will be seeking to pioneer a new way of life, and experiment with innovative forms of governance. Therefore, we will be making the case to select nations that hosting an autonomous seastead city in their waters would produce significant economic, social, and environmental benefits for their citizens.
The engineering study for which we are raising money will be conducted by our colleagues at DeltaSync, a Dutch multidisciplinary research and water architecture firm. Their famed approach - displayed in projects like the Rotterdam Floating Pavillion employs extreme energy-conserving materials, urban architecture capable of dynamic evolution, as well as food and water solutions that clean the ocean as they nourish aquaponic farms.
This campaign is a part of our broader Floating City Project, which is investigating 1) market demand, 2) optimal locations, and 3) ideal designs for the world's first seastead. Within one year we will produce a white paper with our findings.After the preliminary report is released in 2014, we will facilitate collaboration between potential residents, developers, and investors, to actualize the plan.
The Seasteading Institute is sponsoring DeltaSync with an approximately $40,000 grant so they can apply their innovative design approach to our vision of experimentation in governance. The DeltaSync team brings years of experience in innovative architecture and aquatic urban design to the table, along with a portfolio of world class buildings. When DeltaSync's founders Rutger de Graaf and Katrina Czapiewska put their pens to paper, things get built. This will be an in-depth project by their professional team to design a feasible floating community, which could be constructed within just a few years.
All contributions to this project are tax-deductible for U.S. citizens. We are offering some perks for those who contribute, listed on the right side of this page. As an added incentive, each dollar you give will be matched by the Thiel Foundation, doubling your impact on this important project.
If we meet our campaign goal and raise $20,000, we will be able to completely fund this engineering study with the match. If we exceed our goal, the surplus funds will be used for other key design elements of the Floating City Project.
Most importantly, your contribution brings you into the seasteading community. Becoming a "seasteader" means that you not only yearn for a better future for humanity, but are also willing to put skin in the game to demonstrate what a better future could look like. Giving to this campaign shows that you are above partisan bickering about how government "should be," and are ready to lead by example.
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Seasteading – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Seasteading is the concept of creating permanent dwellings at sea, called seasteads, outside the territory claimed by the government of any standing nation. Most proposed seasteads have been modified cruising vessels. Other proposed structures have included a refitted oil platform, a decommissioned anti-aircraft platform, and custom-built floating islands.[1] No one has created a state on the high seas that has been recognized as a sovereign nation, although the Principality of Sealand is a disputed micronation formed on a discarded sea fort near Suffolk, England.[2]
The closest things to a seastead that have been built so far are large ocean-going ships sometimes called "floating cities", and smaller floating islands.
At least two people independently began using the term, which is a portmanteau of sea and homesteading: Ken Neumeyer in his book Sailing the Farm (1981) and Wayne Gramlich in his article "Seasteading Homesteading on the High Seas" (1998).
Outside the Exclusive Economic Zone of 200 nautical miles (370km), which countries can claim according to the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, the high seas are not subject to the laws of any sovereign nation other than the flag under which a ship sails. Examples of organizations using this possibility are Women on Waves, enabling abortions for women in countries where abortions are subject to strict laws, and offshore radio stations which were anchored in international waters. Like these organizations, a seastead might be able to take advantage of the looser laws and regulations that exist outside the sovereignty of nations, and be largely self-governing.
"When Seasteading becomes a viable alternative, switching from one government to another would be a matter of sailing to the other without even leaving your house," said Patri Friedman at the first annual Seasteading conference.[3][4][5]
The Seasteading Institute (TSI), founded by Wayne Gramlich and Patri Friedman on April 15, 2008, is an organization formed to facilitate the establishment of autonomous, mobile communities on seaborne platforms operating in international waters.[3][6][7] Gramlichs 1998 article "SeaSteading Homesteading on the High Seas" outlined the notion of affordable steading, and attracted the attention of Friedman with his proposal for a small-scale project.[8] The two began working together and posted their first collaborative book online in 2001, which explored aspects of seasteading from waste disposal to flags of convenience.
The project picked up mainstream exposure in 2008 after having been brought to the attention of PayPal cofounder Peter Thiel, who invested $500,000 in the institute and has since spoken out on behalf of its viability, most recently in his essay "The Education of a Libertarian",[9] published online by Cato Unbound. TSI has received widespread media attention from sources such as CNN, Wired,[3]Prospect,[10] and The Economist.[7] American journalist John Stossel wrote an article about seasteading in February 2011 and hosted Patri Friedman on his show on the Fox Business Network.[11]
On July 31, 2011, Friedman stepped down from the role of executive director, and became chairman of the board. The institute's president is currently Michael Keenan. Concomitantly, the institute's directors of business strategy and legal strategy went on to start Blueseed, the first commercial seasteading venture.[12]
Between May 31 and June 2, 2012, The Seasteading Institute held its third annual conference.[13]
In July 2012, the institute was transferred ownership of the vessel Opus Casino by a donor.[14] Plans are underway to lease or sell the vessel to a business that would further the research on long-term ocean habitation.[15]
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Engineering | The Seasteading Institute
Medical Offshore Research Facility: Feasibility and Conceptual Design Study
(University of Houston Extreme Environment Design Team, with guidance from George Petrie) -These storyboards (#1,#2,#3,#4,#5) lay out a concept for a three-phase project, intended to culminate in the creation of a purpose-built semi-submersible floating community, offering an innovative cancer treatment not yet approved by United States regulators, along with a broad range of other facilities for researchers, staff, patients, full-time residents and vacationers. The students also produced a video with 3D renderings of what such a platform might look like, which can be viewed on YouTube.
(Lina Suarez, Engineering Intern) 3D renderingswere produced to conceptualize a modular, adaptable seastead, complete with a top-side crane mechanism for rearranging modules or residential units. The ability to easily enter or exit such a seastead configuration (i.e., voting with your house) is expected to enable greater freedom of choice and amplify the competitive pressures needed to spur governmental innovation. Lina Suarez, a student of Naval Architecture, produced the renderings under the guidance of our Director of Engineering, George Petrie.
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Seasteading Energy Study:Evaluation of Sustainable Energy Options for a Small City-on-the-Sea
(Melissa Roth, George Petrie, and Dr. Ronald Willey) -The purpose of this document is to estimate and compare the energy costs in USD/kW and installation cost for ocean thermal energy conversion, solar, wind, and wave systems. Diesel generators were used as a baseline comparison. While it is not yet possible to design a specific seastead, the goal is to determine the feasibility of utilizing the aforementioned renewable energy sources on a seastead housing up to 1,000 people.
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Parametric Analysis of Candidate Configurations for Early Seastead Platforms: Parts 1 & 2
(George L. Petrie, Director of Engineering, The Seasteading Institute, retired Professor of Naval Architecture) This engineering analysis systematically evaluates several different seastead configurations (in a range of sizes) and to quantify their cost, capacity and performance, with emphasis on early seastead communities (as opposed to large future cities at sea).
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The Billionaire King of Techtopia: Critical Eye : Details
When Peter Thiel ventures outside for a run, typically in the early-early morning, when the fog drifts low and slow into the San Francisco Bay, he's often drawn to what the poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti called "the end of land and land of beginning." That means the San Francisco waterfrontespecially the one-and-a-half-mile stretch of pathway hugging the marshy shoreline from Crissy Field to the base of the Golden Gate Bridge. Aesthetically, the appeal is obviousa postcard view of the bridge and the bay, the lapping tidal rhythm, that sort of thingbut for Thiel, a 43-year-old investor and entrepreneur whose knack for anticipating the next big thing has yielded him a $1.5 billion fortune and an iconic, even delphic status in Silicon Valley, there's a symbolic angle as well. This waterline is precisely where the Western frontier ended, where unlimited opportunity finally hit its limit. It's also where, if Thiel is betting correctly, the nextand most audaciousfrontier begins.
Thiel spends a lot of time thinking about frontiers. "Way more than is healthy," he admits. Not just financial frontiers, though that's his day job: He cofounded PayPal, the online money-transfer service, and, most famously, was the angel investor whose half-million-dollar loan catapulted Facebook out of Harvard's dormitories and into the lives of its 750 million users. (In The Social Network, Thiel was portrayed as the crisp venture capitalist whose investment, and dark questioning, widen the rift between Facebook's cofounders.) He manages a hedge fund, Clarium Capital, and is a founding partner in a venture-capital firm called the Founders Fund, both of them housed in an airy brick building on the campuslike grounds of the Presidio, not far from Thiel's jogging path. Yet his frontier obsession extends much further than spreadsheets, further than even technology. Political frontiers, social frontiers, scientific frontiers: All these and more crowd Thiel's head as he navigates the shoreline.
"We're at this pretty important point in society," he says during a brisk walk toward the Golden Gate Bridge, "where we can either find a way to rediscover a frontier, or we're going to be forced to change in a way that's really tough." Thiel is a medium-size man with a compact and blocky frame, close-trimmed reddish-brown hair, and eyes the limpid-blue color of Windex; he has a small, nasal voice and tends to exert himself as he speaks, frequently circling back to amend or reconfigure or soften what he's saying. Discussing the concept of frontiers, however, animates him to an almost uninterruptible degree; concepts, more than anything else, seem to do that.
"One of the things that's endlessly dazzling and mesmerizing is this question about the futurewhat the world is going to be like in 20 years, and what can or should we do to make it better than the default track that it's on," he says, gesturing with his hands while maintaining a fixed stare on the pathway. "But it's a question you can never quite master. I played a lot of chess when I was growing up, and it's similar to some elements of chess, where you can see some moves but you can't see to the end of the game. Even a computer the size of the universe couldn't actually analyze it. There's, like, 10 to the 117th power possible games and something like 10 to the 80th atoms in the observable universe, so it's off by something like 37 orders of magnitude. And chess is something much simpler than realityit's 32 pieces on an eight-by-eight board. Figuring out the complete future of a chess game is a problem more complicated than anything that can be solved in our universe, so figuring out this planet or just our society in the next 10 or 15 years is just not a solvable problem."
Despite the innovations of the past quarter century, some of which have made him very, very wealthy, Thiel is unimpressed by how far we've cometechnologically, politically, socially, financially, the works. The last successful American car company, he likes to note, was Jeep, founded in 1941. "And our cars aren't moving any faster," he says. The space-age future, as giddily envisioned in the fifties and sixties, has yet to arrive. Perhaps on the micro levelas in microprocessorsbut not in the macro realm of big, audacious, and outlandish ideas where Thiel prefers to operate. He gets less satisfaction out of conventional investments in "cloud music" (Spotify) and Hollywood films (Thank You for Smoking) than he does in pursuing big ideas, which is why Thielalong with an all-star cast of venture capitalists, including former PayPal cohorts Ken Howery and Luke Nosek, and Sean Parker, the Napster cofounder and onetime Facebook presidentestablished the Founders Fund. Among its quixotic but potentially highly profitable investments are SpaceX, a space-transport company, and Halcyon Molecular, which aspires to use DNA sequencing to extend human life. Privately, however, Thiel is the primary backer for an idea that takes big, audacious, and outlandish to a whole other level. Two hundred miles west of the Golden Gate Bridge, past that hazy-blue horizon where the Pacific meets the sky, is where Thiel foresees his boldest venture of all. Forget start-up companies. The next frontier is start-up countries.
"Big ideas start as weird ideas." That's Patri Friedman, a former Google engineer, the grandson of the Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman, and, as of 2008, when Thiel seeded him with the same initial investment sum he'd given Mark Zuckerberg four years earlier, the world's most prominent micro-nation entrepreneur. Friedman, a short, kinetic 35-year-old with a wife and two children, maintains an energetic online presence that ranges from blogging about libertarian theory to tweeted dispatches such as "Explored BDSM in SF w/big group of friends tonight." Four years ago, a Clarium Capital employee came across a piece Friedman had written about an idea he called "seasteading." Friedman was soon pitching to Thiel, a staunch libertarian himself, the big, weird idea.
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The Invisible Joystick – Bioshock – Part 1: Sea Steading – Video
The Invisible Joystick - Bioshock - Part 1: Sea Steading
The first video for the new series The Invisible Joystick. A beautiful mixture of video games and liberty. Like, Comment, Subscribe; Let us know how you like...
By: Beyond Liberty
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The Invisible Joystick - Bioshock - Part 1: Sea Steading - Video
Sea Steading ? #28 – Video
Sea Steading ? #28
Pay Pal mogul Peter Thiel is investing in an off shore man made island that will be eventually designated as another country Yahoo news article news.yahoo.comFrom:gotoguyJimViews:132 8ratingsTime:08:17More inPeople Blogs
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Peter Thiel Answers Student Questions at the ISFLC 2012 – Video
26-02-2012 18:24 Peter Thiel answers questions at ISFLC 2012. Produced by Terra Strong
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Peter Thiel Answers Student Questions at the ISFLC 2012 - Video
Michael Keenan (Seasteading Institute) Interview on Freethought Radio – Video
27-03-2012 13:56 Michael Keenan, president of The Seasteading Institute, joins the program to discuss the possibilities of free cities and the engineering difficulties of it. Freethought Radio airs every Monday from 6PM-9PM PST on KKSM AM 1320 Palomar College Radio in San Diego county. Hosted & produced by Alex Fidel. KKSM is comprised of student staff from Palomar College, and has a wide variety of different music & talk shows. Freethought offers a wide selection of innovative heavy metal & rock music that tends to get ignored by mainstream radio stations. Download the full podcast here:
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Michael Keenan (Seasteading Institute) Interview on Freethought Radio - Video