Paypal Founder Puts a Half Million Dollars Into Seasteading

eldavojohn writes "Wired is running an informative article on Paypal Founder Peter Thiel's investment in seasteading. There's a great graphic indicating how the spar design helps platforms weather rough seas with a ballast. There's a lot more than just Thiel throwing the half million towards this and they hope to pitch this to San Fransisco for a bay pilot. Ocean colonies can be both liberating and also downright human-rights-lacking scary."

Sweet

After years of being a digital pirate, I've been looking for the chance to branch out into naval piracy. This looks like a great career opportunity!

Re:Sweet

Stealing people's belly buttons is just wrong.

Re:Sweet

*sigh* Piracy isn't steali....HEY! Who took my BELLY BUTTON! GODDAMMIT!!!

Pacific Gyre / Great Pacific Garbage Patch

Only if they could build a big plastic island like this guy [wikipedia.org],
and somehow make it out of all this crap. [wikipedia.org] Now that would be
worthwhile.

Re:Sweet

Arrr, but that's not me leg ye saucy strumpet!

//got nuthin

Confirmed shipping addresses...

So, how will we confirm our shipping addresses within paypal? I mean, we'll be constantly moving around the ocean...

Re:Confirmed shipping addresses...

So just pick a place [nasa.gov] where there aren't any hurricanes. :)

Did anyone read that as....

Did anyone read that as "Paypal Founder Peter Thief...."?
Would have been oddly suiting....

"fraternal religious order"

HA! I believe the proper term is "tax dodge". Or dare I say it? Cult

Attn: Slashdot,
Please block this post from reaching the UK [slashdot.org]

infrastructure + risk / population

You need to compute the value, whenever looking at new commune/ collective/ arcology/ society construction. This is in some ways a non-numeric computation, but you should at least look at the basic per capita cost, e.g., cost(infrastructure + risk) / population. Many managers focus on one but ignore the other, but any cost-benefit study must look at both. One offset to the cost would be the value of goods or services produced by the population.

A yurt in a comfortable biome houses a small self-sufficient family at nearly no cost. A small crew can man an offshore oil rig (at least, in moderate shifts) because of the immense value of the product. A commune living in a multi-hundred-ton cylinder of concrete and steel floating a dozen miles offshore had better have some damn valuable product to overcome the huge costs of infrastructure and risk.

get real

Do you seriously think the established nation states of this world are just going to let a bunch of platforms float outside their jurisdiction and reach?

In fact, nations don't even have to do anything about their landmass, they can simply apply their laws to their citizens in international waters, and they can enforce them there too. So, if you are a US or European citizen, you'll still be subject to DMCA, high taxes, and drug laws. Of course, you can give up all your citizenships, but then you'd have a hard time doing business with anybody on land.

This kind of escapism just doesn't help. Either fix your own nation or stop complaining. Running away stopped being an option when the West was settled, and it won't be an option again until we figure out FTL travel.

Re:get real

This kind of escapism just doesn't help. Either fix your own nation or stop complaining. Running away stopped being an option when the West was settled, and it won't be an option again until we figure out FTL travel.

You know, for many people it simply isn't an option any more. What are the legal means you have in the USA - you can vote locally, for congress senate and the President.

Let's face it, for all federal elections (where most power is concentrated these days) you get two choices, which are virtually the same person when it comes down to it.

If you really intend to "fix your own nation" you virtually have to dedicate your entire life to doing so.

It is simply unfair to condemn people because they haven't "fixed their own nation" in the face of their compatriots' ignorance and big-government vested interest. It could be argued that it makes more sense to run away to sea - it may be more efficient!

Re:get real

What if you find the whole concept of nations with millions of inhabitants ridiculous? How do you fix that without resorting to escapism?

Re:get real

Either fix your own nation or stop complaining.

A recent poll in the US showed that 17% of people thought that the issue of whether a candidate wore a flag pin on his/her lapel was important. The fix for that is a bullet.

Deep Libertarianism: Human Ecology

Seasteads are a great way to protect human rights because they protect the most fundamental human right, the one from which all others are derived: The right to vote with your feet.

If all you do is ensure that anyone can leave any time they want, then you have only one remaining ingredient to support this most fundamental human right:

Somewhere to go.

With the current, very limited, number of territories world-wide, the choices available to refugees is limited not only by the number of territories that would welcome them, but by the absolute number of territories.

Increase the baseline number of territories and freedom reigns.

The problem with current conceptions of "human rights" is they are enumerated in some sort of unstructured laundry list which results in the entire edifice crumbling under stress. Its tragic because the more you "feel" various things are "rights" -- the more "rights" you put on your wishful-thinking-list, the more "righteous" you sound to the intellectually handicapped. This creates a terrible situation for humanity -- where facades of "human rights" displace the need for territory -- the need for carrying capacity -- that forms the real foundation of life hence humanity hence their rights.

I've written up some thoughts on the nuances of a more rationally architected system supporting human rights in Deep Libertarianism: Human Ecology [majorityrights.com] that allows jurisdictions to become as "tyrannical" as they want over their territory, so long as they let people leave at will and support the creation of carrying capacity for the formation of volulntary association.

Seasteading is an important potential in this direction.

Unfortunately, Google's Patri Friedman, while far better than most, is indulging in more of the sloppy thinking that endangers human rights when he says things like "You can change your government without having to leave your house" or implies the assumption that seasteading jurisdictions will not exclude immigrants at their whim. We live in a physical universe with ecologies that operate in space. Attempting to deny spatial structure because you find it inconvenient or even "oppressive" is simply fantasy.

Re:no thanks

Exactly.. storms and quakes are dangerous enough on land. And while there may not necessarily be physical assets worth plundering (because rich people never keep their valuables on hand, I guess), there are still protection rackets, hostage/ransom situations, and random violence to contend with, and as a wealthy independent nation, you'd be ripe for all of the above.

You'd have low volume, high cost, and high reliance on imports, with little to nothing to export, except perhaps intellectual property (with no means to protect), assuming you even believe in IP as a libertarian. Satellite internet is high latency, low bandwidth, and most people would probably be dissatisfied with such limited connection to the outside world.

Cabin fever is all but guaranteed, and an active social life is basically out of the question. You'd have to worry about mutiny, sabotage, fires, fresh water supply, leaks, maintenance, and all the other concerns of a seagoing vessel, without the convenience of being able to pull into a port if things get hairy. In short, it seems like the disadvantages seriously outweigh any advantage of pseudo-independence (pseudo, since you're still reliant on the outside world to A) play nice, and B) supply you with durable goods and consumables).

But what do I know? I've only spent 6 years in the Navy, and 6 years living on a small island.. not like I've had any relevant experience.

Re:no thanks

My bet is that these colonies can be the next Atlantis if someone finds a cheep way to use the local resources to make sturdy building material (something like nanites that turn the sand into quartz). However that is a LONG way off.

Once upon a time, I read a book which addressed this issue, albeit for a different seafaring concept. It involved using manganese (I seem to recall) bars in a mesh, which, when electricity was run through it, would accrete calcium carbonate to it from seawater. Eventually, this would create a shell on which the colony would float, and from which further accretions could expand it.

The concept also involved leveraging temperature differentials in seawater to generate electricity, and using the immediate vicinity of colonies to farm algae, etc. Using these colonies as a hub of a hydrogen economy was also envisioned.

These ideas made it into a website for the Living Universe Foundation, but I don't recall if the book had any connection to them or not.

Great Pacific Garbage Patch

Here's a crazy idea...

Word is there exists the Great Pacific Garbage Patch [google.com] which is the accumulation of seaborne trash into a blob somewhere on par with Texas in size.
Now work with me here ...
That's a whole lotta floating stuff already in a relatively stable position (occupying a major ocean current vortex); surely an inventive aspiring frontiersman could turn that mass of materials into an inhabitable floating island. Material acquisition & relocation is already mostly taken care of, as there's a Texas-sized mass of it already there. Much of it is plastic, which should be easily (for the "news for nerds" crowd) reformed on-site into more suitable structures. It's already in a stable vortex, so it's not going to be unmanagably mobile, and remains well outside any nation's claimable waters. There may already be sufficiently compacted sections to stand on & start work from.

Thoughts?

Re:Best current bet for utopia

I'm not sure seasteading is necessarily the best bet. Creating artificial islands might be more feasible than creating floating platforms. There are a vast number of seamounts just under the ocean's surface (ie: within 20 meters) that lie well outside any territorial waters of nations, particularly in the southwestern Pacific and the mid-atlantic. I'm not sure the advantages of mobility offered by seastead platforms outweigh the advantages of building up from the seafloor itself. And don't get locked into thinking this could only be done by building a tower down from the surface. For a a relatively modest cost (hundreds of millions), artificial islands make from deposited rubble just like the projects in Dubai could be undertaken in hundreds of locations worldwide.

Re:Best current bet for utopia

> Utopia doesn't exist, will not exist ... ever.

You are aware that the word "Utopia" means "Nowhere", right?

Re:Best current bet for utopia

Utopia is not an option. On the other hand, free markets and private property limit the negative effects of greed and turn it into a positive externality.

Prove it. From what I've seen, free markets allow greedy and selfish people to accumulate more money than cooperative people. Money is force. With enough money, one can manipulate markets. This allows the greedy to attack the rest of us economically, to force us into servitude.

By encouraging greed and discouraging cooperation, a free market system ensures that everyone will have to act in a greedy and selfish fashion in order not to be taken advantage of by the greedy and selfish.

Re:Best current bet for utopia

First time I've ever wanted to friend an AC.

Living in a society is about compromise and respect for other peoples opinions and beliefs. Groups inside a society who have no tolerance for other views are a serious issue. Most of the problems societies have are when these groups get too powerful.

Frankly sending them all out into the middle of the ocean sounds like a great idea. Living accommodations optional.

Re:Best current bet for utopia

Groups inside a society who have no tolerance for other views are a serious issue.

The inverse, groups that cannot be tolerated by society can be problematic as well. Giving the Puritans land far far from the rest of England was just as much a blessing to England as the Puritans. Any modern day cult that builds a compound in the middle of nowhere could be said to tolerate other's views, but they don't really fit in so well when we find that they are like to marry 14 year old girls to 45 year old men. But out in the middle of the ocean, it wouldn't really bother us anymore. Or would it? Would the American people allow such a society to sit just off our shores? What about a cannabis farming floating island anchored just north of Bermuda, do you think Uncle Sam would let them alone? I don't think these floating islands are going to be the escape from global government/society that many want them to be.

Re:Slashdot Whipping Post Du Jour

Or is there some mysterious eBay-PayPal-Scientology connection I'm ignorent of?

They're all full of assholes?

Re:heh

Also wondering about food, waste disposal and power.

The ocean is full of tasty critters.

The critters dump their organic waste into the water, where it is recycled by other critters. Why shouldn't the humans? (They already do it on ocean-going vessels. Blackwater is an issue on land and enclosed waterways, not in mid ocean.)

For non-biodegradable waste: Jetsam dumped overboard in deep water won't be an issue for geologic time. That leaves flotsam, which would have to be dealt with in more ordinary ways. (Fortunately, that's a small amount of the waste and mostly imported anyhow. So it can be shipped out to some place that can handle it.)

At most latitudes there's lots of wind available, with no mountains, trees, and buildings to slow it down. (Sometimes there's a bit more wind than you'd like.)

If you want to settle the "horse latitudes" (where there's rarely wind), there's plenty of solar power. And a handy way to tap it is to pump up cold water from deeper down and run a heat engine on the temperature difference between it and the upper-level water. Then you dump the nutrient-rich deep water locally and farm the resulting massive explosion of plants and critters.

The idea that purchasing a flag of convenience will providing meaningful protection seems a bit naive..

Flags of convenience are a protection against GOVERNMENT predation. (Which is essentially the point of this whole exercise.)

Will every citizen be a trained firefighter? Who will provide emergency medical services?

The same sort of people who provide such services on ocean-going vessels or in houses in very rural areas. These are already solved problems - with solutions that vary depending on the size of the community and the degree of its location's isolation.