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This post from ClubOrlov (http://cluborlov.blogspot.com/2011/12/occupy-million-dollar-view.html) got me thinking about what an American version of "boat people" might look like.  The truth is that there are already a huge number of Americans who live aboard boats, most tend not to go anywhere.  There are a number of reasons for this, but a big one is that even though it's possible to live full time on a (relatively) cheap 'weekender' without a loan payment, the spartan nature of living on such a vessel on the open ocean leads most people to maintain a slip rental at a marina.  Such a slip rental is about as expensive as renting an apartment, and thus most people who do it either must maintain a steady income or are (retired with pension | otherwise independently wealthy).  It's certainly possible for most people to spend a few days away from the marina, but it's much like camping; no hot showers, no refrigerated foods beyond what an ice chest can maintain, limited choices in meals and near zero adult conversation (beyond your spouse) other than the marine radio.  Also, it's hard for most people to afford a sat phone, so access to modern telecommunications via the Internet tends to require a line of sight to the marina boathouse.  So most people, retired or otherwise, who live aboard a yacht of any size that could be affordable to a middle class couple for equal or less than living on land tend to either stay at the marina for access to (hot showers | powered refrigeration | a toilet | a relatively inexpensive supply of drinkable water | Internet & cell service | freshly prepared hot meals | whatever) or are 'making passage' from one port marina to the next as fast as is reasonablely possible.

That all said, it occurs to me that it's possible that a form of 'seasteading' could occur long before massive floating cities could be built, by communities of live-aboards moving in 'flotillas' but served by a larger vessel with the capacity to serve as many of these needs while on the open ocean.  The way this would work is like a 'floating trailer park' or 'redneck yacht club' wherein all of the smaller boats lash themselves together and to the large vessel in the evenings, have dinner together on the deck of the large vessel, showers on the large vessel, and sleep on their own vessel while the crew of the main ship kept the 'watch'.  No one would be trying to go anywhere overnight (which is something that individual boaters will often do trying to make passage quickly) but would all wake up, have breakfast together again on the main boat, and then seperate and shove off to all make a pre-determined amount of headway towards their next primary destination.  The main boat would need to be large enough, with enough displacement, to carry enough water, fuel and food for it's own crew and sip as well as for many others.  A good target would be a large ship with teh resources to provide for the needs of 30 people (the inrastructure needs can be estimated based upon the number of people and the legth of time, because most of the resources are about pepole, not boats) for 30 days.  So 900 persondays.  This would permit a main ship with a crew of six to service a flotilla of about a dozen small boats (presume 2 people per boat) for one month between port stops for restocking or 14 boats for a two week long passage.  Also, the true live aboards wouldn't need stop at any particular port at all, and could keep following teh lead ship on it's planned route or stop off to 'winter' in any particular port that might appeal to them.  Groups of live abaords could charter such a boat to 'escort' them from northern ports to Southern ports so that they didn't individually need to make landfall at all along the trip, nor rush to get there, payijng for the eintire trip with all servces included.  Other such escorts ships could simply follow a published route, and live abourds could choose to join the flotilla for a time, paying for their needed services individually, and then abandon the flotilla as it suits them, perhaps to join another more heading their prefered direction.  Large ships tend to cost a lot, not just because of the logrithmacly increasing complexity of construction, but also for the relatively high costs of being able to provide these comforts independent of shore support.  Large ships, including cruise lines, can desalinate seawater while underway using very expensive reverse osmosis filters, but benefit by the economies of scale that providing water for 1000 paying  guests provide.  It's possible to get such systems for small yachts also, but their bulky size, power and maintaince requirements, and high upfront costs make them very impractical for a small boat not much bigger than a bedroom.  The same can be said for building a shower with a hot water heater, a decent sized galley, a sat phone or even an inboard engine.

So then, what does it take to supply 900 persondays?  The average person on land consumes between 5K and 7K gallons of tapwater per month.  Most live aboard types would consume much less, since most of that is actually flushwater and many marine 'heads' are low or no water types, such as a composting toilet (which are pretty expensive ifbuy a commerical one) or even somethng as simple as a sawdust bucket toilet on the low end (http://www.duckworksmagazine.com/05/articles/toilet/index.cfm).  So assuming the low end of that range, and half of that range is flushwater that can be disregarded, we end up with 2500 gallons per month per person.  This sound high, but includes showers, cooking water & cleaning water in addition to what is actually intended to drink.  So 2500 * 30 = 75K gallons of freshwater storage or the capacity to desalinate and filter 2500 gallons per day, or some combination therein.  The escort ship would also have to include tanks capable of carrying and pumping large amounts of fuel, both to sell to clients and for internal needs, such as refrigeration (a great example of an economy of scale advantage, an escort ship could power a pair of chest freezers,one set up as a chest refrig, via an engine driven refrigeration compressor for vastly less energy and sunk costs than each boat could do so individually) cooking and hot water (another huge economy of scale advantage).

Really, I think I might smell real oprotunity here.

EDIT: This website also contributed to this line of thinking (http://www.sealionsfoundation.com/page29.php) even though I don't think highly of their plan or it's chances of success.

A couple notes I have from living and working on a lot of boats:

Desalinators are very problem-prone, and have a limit to the amount of purification/prefiltration they can carry out. Offshore, this isn't as much of an issue, but if a red-tide or any other plankton bloom rolls through, your desalination plant is down for the count until this passes. A personal scale machine for a water-conscious couple can be purchased and maintained for quite a reasonable price compared to the cost of trucking your water along with you and wasting fuel. The caveat of course is that if it goes, you're boned. I cannot tell you how many times I have been on 'drinking water only' usage because of equipment failures.

Regarding toilets, a bit of water is needed to keep things tidy, but at sea you don't bog down your septic tanks, you just jettison your waste.

For showers and that side of hygiene, I have been on fancy hot-water ships, and I have been on jump in the 12C water and wash as fast as you can before you get hypothermia vessels. Salt water isn't ideal for that squeaky clean feeling, but depending on the location, a black reservoir on deck can give you a nice supply of lukewarm water to bathe with. Hot water isn't even that much of a problem, because if you are running engines or gen-sets, you can run a coil around the block and use that to heat your water. I had a lobster boat plumbed up to use a bait tank as a hot tub. We would go to the bar, get some drinks and some skirts and roll out to do our plankton trawling or whatever and in the meantime, warm up the hottub and get ready to party.

Sat-phones are friggin' expensive. Communication is basically limited to line-of-sight unless you can afford $2-3USD a minute.

Brine chillers are cheap as hell and very effective...hell, they used them on the Titanic. Depending on where you are in the world, they are more than sufficient to keep perishables. With a cooperative effort, a bunch of chickens can go a long way for food production and eliminate a large bit of perishable storage...you did say 'redneck trailer park'...grain is cheaper and easier to store than meat and eggs. Side-note: eggs can go a frighteningly long time unrefrigerated if they aren't in crazy heat. I have kept eggs for a week at low room temp ~65F without trouble. I haven't tried pushing it much further than that. Same goes with a lot of other 'perishables'; I bring bacon backpacking all the time and will leave it unrefrigerated for lengths of time that would disgust most Americans. I have yet to get ill from it.

You can't tie boats up in open water. The idea of a mother ship and a bunch of satellites is great, and it is increasingly the way people travel through areas of high piracy, but the notion that you can tie up and hop from ship to ship without problems is very wrong. It is one of the most dangerous things in this whole mix, and anyone who has had to jump from a vessel into a skiff in high seas will agree with me. I can swim a mile without batting an eye, but I am scared shitless every time I need to move equipment from one boat to another or even just board another boat. Even in relatively calm 3-4 ft groundswell, wind-chop aside, you are looking at a 3-4ft change in height with each wave.

You can pick up a sailboat ready to make a serious trip for only a few thousand USD. Where it gets expensive is when you want solar panels and wind turbines and navigation equipment. Shit gets expensive fast, but if this was a cooperative and an ongoing flotilla, not everyone would need a full array of nav gear.

Needless to say, I am in. Boatopia 2015!

On a side note, MoonShadow, check out www.ussubmarines.com and try not to touch yourself while you peruse. Phoenix 1000 class: 213ft length, 26 ft berth, 470 m^2 of floorspace, docking shuttle submarine capable of 3000m dives (and capable of picking up passengers without surfacing the mother-sub), 30 day oxygen supply with full crew and passenger compliment and with Stirling engines (adding considerable cost to the already $78mil tag) could damn-near make a transatlantic crossing underwater.

Yes, most of the time, but I was thinking about common denominators, and many costal crusiers are set up to manage waste under US law, not the Law of the Sea.  Those with septic tanks often don't have their own pumps to jettison waste or a low drain port while the tank is kept above the water line, making the design assumption that the owner would be paying a marina to pumpout.  A portable, gas powered sludge pump would serve this purpose, and could be moved from boat to boat once each day without causing a 'stink'

I'm really just thinking out loud here, and the concept assumes that a large number of the ships in the flotilla are primarily sail driven coastal crusiers that would otherwise be unsafe to venture far into the open ocean without the additional security of group travel, for both the piracy issue and the 'single-point-of-failure' issue.  Group travel offers the security of operational redudancy, should there occur mechanical breakdowns or hull failure.  Some, at least.


Individual sat phones are expensive, but a marine wifi-mesh with Viop and a HF transceiver or sat uplink on the escort ship is less expensive.


And butter lasts for months at room temp, if protected from oxygen.  I have a 'butter bell' crock that does this on my countertop.  Works perfectly.

I'm sure there are many other ways to arrange this.


There has to be a way to deal with this.  I don't have experience on the open ocean, but there has got to be someone with insight on how the risks here could be mitigated.


Yes, exactly my point.  Those who pay very little for a floating bedroom with a sail might be willing to pay a little for infrastructure support on an open ocean crossing.
Needless to say, I am in. Boatopia 2015!

On a side note, MoonShadow, check out www.ussubmarines.com and try not to touch yourself while you peruse.

[/quote]

Thanks, now I need to clean my keyboard!

I was just tossing some thoughts out there as well, please don't think I am criticizing or anything.

Regarding the transfer/crossing from one vessel to another: when we needed to move equipment, we either ran lines and 'tyrolean'ed' it across using our trawling A-frames (which most boats don't have), or if it was calm enough, pulled close enough to make the leap. I have seen 30,000lb lines snap trying to keep two trawlers close in high seas. It's scary, and everyone involved runs a serious risk of being crushed between the boats or losing a limb when a line pops. I don't know that anyone has solved the problem. Even with the coast guard and fish and game who do it all day everyday, it was always a big clusterfuck endangering everyone.

So, next question: How do we get $100mil for the sub and 5 years of maintenance?

And a laundrymat.  The escort boat needs a laundrymat.

I am pretty sure that sea-law dictates that you can only wear one change of clothes, and you wash them by jumping in the water. That's what I always did, anyways. You also brush your teeth with rum.

My google-fu produced this link straight away...

http://www.stowawayholdaway.com/

What about an upsized version of this thing, perhaps made from the kind of gas shocks that hold up my minivan's rear door?  And then the gap could be spanned by a collapsible gangplank with a handrail and secured to the escort ship's deck.


Go back in time and invent Angry Birds?

I could do that too, but it's the female that sets the baseline for acceptable cleanliness for both of us.  I'm certain that I'm not unique in this marital aspect.


That would actually work pretty well.  Kill germs like listerine, anyway.

or just some mooring whips on the escort boat, big fenders, and a gangplank.

This is, I think, fairly appropriate. http://xkcd.com/846/ (http://xkcd.com/846/)

What about "drydocking" the smaller boats on the bigger one -- hoisting them out of the water somehow, so they are fluctuating in-time with the "hub."

The other concern I have, is what about storms? Would there be a minimum-boat size requirement, to ensure they could all handle large waves?

why? It seems foolish and impractical to live on the water.

Because you do not have to pay taxes and join military forces that you disagree with?

A big catamaran could do this, but only one boat at a time.  Lifting clear of the water isn't necessary, just lifting it enough that it's no longer independently bouyant and then mechanically coupled to the escort ship.

No minimum, because escorting boats that aren't quite independently capable is the point.  One of the primary jobs of a flotilla leader is to keep on top of weather threats, and steer clear of them or know when to tell the rest to drop the plan and run their boats, and which direction to flee.  Just about any weekender or coastal cruiser can cross the Atlantic, if there isn't anything that can go wrong, during the right season.  You don't want to  be trying to get to Maine in November and you don't want to be East of Florida during hurricane season, for examples.  All other oceans have their own storm seasons and calm seasons.  As bad at longer term predictions that meterology is, the daily storm reports are a modern miracle for anyone who actually lives on a boat anywhere near the Eastern seaboard of the US, including the intercoastal waterway.

Then you are most certainly not the target demographic.  You may now return to your regularly scheduled lifestyle.

Love you moon shadow but no, not reading it lol.

We can go pick up the Sea Shadow for free as long as we take the 100m+ dry dock barge it is housed in. The government has been trying to pawn it off on someone for years now. That is a huge dry dock with displacement for millions of pounds of cargo and a low radar profile stealth ship. Who's in?

http://scotthaefner.com/beyond/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/fleet/fleet-33.jpg

e:poor me, I have been away so long I had trouble with my brackets...

Just looking for a short answer to why.

Seriously? You aren't joking or trolling? You can't see the benefit of a mobile city free from all government interference?

I guess I am semi-trolling as I am asking a group of diehards to explain to a skeptic how such an absurd logistical nightmare could be considered a viable option.

Alternative places to live that face difficulties on different magnitudes of this:
* The moon
* Space in general
* Under the ocean
* In the middle of the Sahara (yes part of nations, but I don't think anyone would care)
* North or south pole
* Somalia (no real central government for the last 15 years, and is a good libertarian example of an economy that works without government) (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somalia)

If you acquired a large cargo ship to live in lets say, and lived in it, you would still fall under international law, and you would still need to transact with people living under governments and thus would be tangentially interfered with by said governments.

You can live in the wilds of even the USA and still avoid the reach of government. And you will have solid ground, access to drinkable water, farmable land, and trade with outsiders. There have been plenty of people that have successfully moved off the grid and without the likely outcome of meeting a watery grave.

Escape from government ihas nothing to do with my perposal, per se.  My proposal is to literally provide for the underserved logistics of those who already do choose to live on boats.

I personally believe that 7 billion is well above the carrying capacity of earth, and the first to innovate and shed complete dependence on farmland will prosper immensely in the end. I could give a rat's ass about the government in the big picture, really.

The counter examples provided are all retarded:

* The moon - is the fucking moon.
* Space in general - might as well be the fucking moon.
* Under the ocean - ???
* In the middle of the Sahara (yes part of nations, but I don't think anyone would care) - inhospitable
* North or south pole - inhospitable
* Somalia - I like both food and not having my family raped and mutilated in front of me.

This 'absurd logistical nightmare' is the life that millions of people lead already. I don't think you know much about sailing, yachting or boating in general.

My suggestions for alternatives were supposed to all not be good ones. I was showing a basket of similar ideas as far as the trouble you would have to go through to exist in them.

Sorry I made the assumption about the independence from the government thing. I thought that was the point. I am interested in how you could effectively use the ocean for food production that would be more effective than lets say in a desert climate.

By the way, I am not too shabby for a novice sailor, thank you very much.

Aquaculture.

Seriously though, there are millions of people already who just sail around aimlessly, and plenty of them are flat broke. You know how much it costs to throw an anchor down? Nothin'. We're talking about creating a cooperative doing the same, which would be a lot easier than soloing it.

Wow, every week the community comes up with some new way to implement or use the technology for more Sci-Fi type things, and seemingly pushes us closer and close to the world of Snowcrash.
Some thoughts:

In another discussion, some people were complaining about lack of government leading to ownership of nukes. I think this idea would be greatly helped by private ownership of such, if not for a privately owned nuclear generator like those on military ships, at least as a source of heat to quickly boil, evaporate, and desalinate sea water. So, another good use for privately owned nukes, but sadly too illegal.

Regarding storing things like meat, why not salt and dry it? Plenty of salt and sunny wind around, usually. Is there a reason that isn't done often on ships? Requires too much drinking water to wash down maybe?

If this is a flotilla community similar to occupy movements, are these boats stable enough to set up stationary bikes hooked up to generators, like they had at the NY protest? It's not much power, but it will keep your electronics charged.

If such a flotilla does happen, do you think there would be much use in "mining" the great garbage patch in the Pacific for raw materials, burnable fuels, or whatever?

As for sat phones, yeah, cheapest option would be to just get satellite broadband for $40 to $60 a month, share over wifi, and use VOIP.

Only major question: where will money come from? Teleworking? Fishing? Harvesting and recycling floating garbage? Rich investor types only? (buying up lots of Bitcoin and making money on skyrocketing deflation?)

Talk about inhospitable. How do you explain New Jersey? It also might as well be the moon.

New Jersey can be forgiven for producing such rough and tumble individuals as Jon Stewart. All we ever got from the moon is some rocks and dim light (and werewolves).

Although salt as a preservative is useful, it's not nearly as reliable as refrigeration and all that salt is a health issue. 


I was using those links as an example as to how I got to my idea, don't let them limit the concept.  Cats are pretty stable, but there are better ways to generate power on a boat.  Solar cells are obvious, but there are also little turbines that you can get for a sailboat that generate charging power from the passing flow while underway, at the cost of some extra drag.  There are also little wind turbines.


No, because most of that is very dispersed, and would require huge fishing nets to get.  And all that you would be left with is plastic.  Everything else eventually rots.


Obviously you didn't read the thread.  Money comes from selling infrastructure services to some yacht owners on the move, many of whom are pensioners trying to save living money while seeing the world in retirement; among other sources.

(New Jersey native)
New Jersey has a bad reputation, but it has a wide variety of wilderness, farmland and mountains outside of the areas that most people tend to see (unfortunately most just see Newark airport, which is as bad as can be found in NJ). Don't just accept the general accepted limited view of NJ. You will miss out on a lot.

Sorry, I was thinking more ahead as a means for people to permanently exist as part of this flotilla, not as just a business venture for a "mother ship"

Gotta start somewhere :)

One misconception about the ocean is that there is stuff in it. That really isn't the case once you are away from the coast, save for migratory species and huge pelagic predators which are only there because they are on their way to a coast.

Places like the Sargasso Sea are damn near devoid of higher life, and are so far from anything that it is impractical to think of them as a garbage dump you can pick through.

I'm delighted to find this topic being discussed here, and surprised that no one has yet posted any links to http://seasteading.org. (http://seasteading.org.)  A group of seasteading enthusiasts has for the past three years built a flotilla of boats and improvised floating art projects as http://ephemerisle.org (http://ephemerisle.org).  We simply put together a prototype seastead in the middle of the Sacramento River Delta and live on it for the better part of a week.  Not all of us are experienced mariners, so it is helpful to have seasoned sailors on the crew, but every year we learn more about properly anchoring in the location, checking tide tables so we're not caught unprepared, and learning how best to tie up a bunch of boats into a floating "village."  The next Ephemerisle will be born on June 6, 2012 and dismantled on June 10, 2012, and everyone is welcome to attend.  It is an experiment in radical self-reliance and, like Burning Man, you pretty much have to fend for yourself, so be prepared to exercise your freedom AND take responsibility for yourself.  A French television crew joined us for a few days last year, and the final program has been posted online at http://vimeo.com/32372015 (http://vimeo.com/32372015).  The Ephemerisle segment is the last part of the program.

Of course, practical seasteading, as envisioned by TSI, goes far beyond putting together a flotilla of boats on the ocean.  The Seasteading Institute does research into the technology of establishing floating platforms that could become self-sustaining communities that would be able to weather storms, produce marketable goods and services and experiment with novel forms of social organization. 

Getting to that level will require a lot of hard work, trial and error and small incremental projects building upon one another.  The first step is "shipsteading," taking existing technology and adapting it to a semi-permanent floating community or business enterprise.  The first commercial shipsteading venture has just been launched this year in the form of http://blueseed.co (http://blueseed.co). This project has generated a huge amount of press in the past two months since they began raising venture capital, and the core founders of BlueSeed were all at last month's Bitcoin meetup at Google, so bitcoin is definitely on the table as a business opportunity they are interested in pursuing.

Ultimately, marine engineers advise building semi-submersible structures on the template of offshore oil platforms, which are proven to be durable and reliable under the most challenging of conditions, albeit an astonishingly expensive endeavor.  But this is not a short-term project.  Those of us invested in the seasteading concept are in it for the long term.  This is a vision that we believe is not only possible, but inevitable.  As governments become increasingly repressive of human liberty, it has become clear that land-based governments are sinking, and the only practical alternative is for humans to return to the sea from which our species originated.

there's plenty of 'islands' out there that are just a few metres below sea level, I wonder how much it would cost to build your own island on top of one such 'island'.

Well, most of those are either within the coastal space of an existing nation, too unstable to form a foundation, or both.

There are a fair amount of US controlled uninhabited islands (read: bird shit covered rocks in the middle of nowhere), many of which you could probably squat on without ramification. No one has really cared about them since WWII.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guano_Islands_Act

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Guano_Island_claims

side note about submerged islands: look up Cortez Bank off of San Diego...you don't want to live where 120ft swells pile up...

Awesome. What about farming?

http://www.fastcoexist.com/1678720/former-seasteaders-come-ashore-to-start-libertarian-utopias-in-honduran-jungle

I'm a bit of a landlubber myself although I do appreciate the idea of seasteading.

How much farming does Japan do?  (hint, not much)

Aquaculture is a major area of study for TSI.  In fact, one of the architects of an aquaculture business plan will be presenting a detailed talk at the next Seasteading meetup in Millbrae, California on Tuesday, December 20, 2011.  See http://www.meetup.com/sfbay-seasteading/ for details.

I see, seems like you guys have it together. A fascinating idea.

Actually, the Lifeboats idea doesn't even use aquaculture.  They intend to use hydoponics.

I tried hydroponics once. Ended up with a watermelon 2.5 inches in diameter that was almost all core. It was FAIL.

So what do seasteaders envision in the far future? Will a subset of humans evolve to be marine mammals in the same vein as dolphins, seals, etc?

Lots of places where taxes are minimal and there is no military obligation.  $1 mil retirement fund would last a lot longer in a country like Belize then in some high sea adventure where the cost of everything is increased by 100% to 20,000%.

What if I don't like Belize?

What if I want to live in a country full of rich people, which resembles a floating resort, has no laws or taxes, and lets me do whatever I want as long as I'm not hurting my neighbors?

How are you going to achieve both?  Either you can hurt your neighbors or there has to be some system of laws (maybe simplified, maybe mutually agreed upon).  Otherwise it is simply might makes right and if you have enough might you can hurt your neighbor.

Still if you want a rich floating city go ahead however I think many are underestimating the costs involved.  Everything is expensive at sea.  Water, fuel, electricity, food, replacement parts, maintenance, etc.

There would be no manmade statutes.  The natural laws apply, and maybe a couple of extra laws agreed upon by all members prior to entry to protect the society at large.

Which would be very similar to a state.  Much like if you wish to immigrate to the US you need to accept the extra laws agreed upon by members to protect the society.  I grant you the US has law too many laws and thus too high of a regulatory cost (both in taxes and stiffled freedom) but you are merely talking about differences in scale.

Granted in a smaller society you can get away with less laws/rules and operate by consensus but the idea that it isn't a manmade state is of dubious value.  The point was the "no laws" and "neighbors can't hurt neighbors" are mutually exclusive.  As the number of people grows the likelihood you can operate by consensus is slim.  Say everyone except one person in community wishes to prohibit sex with a minor under age of 14.  Going to accept non-consensus and 99.9% rule?  Well you just introduced voting and non-consensus laws.  

Why can't it be "no laws" and "neighbor CAN hurt neighbor?" It just keeps going until all the bothersome aholes are shot, deported, or leave on their own. Trolling and being swamped with annoying people doesn't work when there are real life consequences involved.
Regarding the person having sex with a minor, if:
* They can defend themselves
* I believe they are too much of a risk and trouble for me to interfere with
* They believe the trouble of keeping it all secret, or not being able to do business with most people, is worth having sex with a 14 year year old
Then I guess they will be able to get away with it. Just as it happens now.

What if the one wanting to hurt the neighbor has the biggest guns?  Not saying that isn't acceptable but pretending you can both have no laws and assurance that neighbors don't hurt neighbors is naive.

Then he will hurt the neighbor. Who ever said there are any assurances? What assurances do you have that one of your neighbors won't shoot you tomorrow?

Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure, or nothing.

-Helen Keller

Read more: http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/h/helenkelle121787.html#ixzz1h7cYSV3Q

Read more quotes from a socialist? :P

edit: Here, have a quote.

"Until the great mass of the people shall be filled with the sense of responsibility for each other's welfare, social justice can never be attained."

-Helen Keller

It was an obvious truth, stated well, by someone who knows that subject more than the rest of us.  Helen Keller undoubtedly was an expert on the falsehoods of security, for she had none except for what was provided for her by others.  Just because she was insightful in this topic, doesn't imply that she was equally insightful in others.  Likewise, the Unibomber made some good points in his manifesto and he was  a homicidal nutjob; but the fact that he was a homicidal nutjob doesn't necessarily detract from his other insights.  There are many other current examples that comes to mind straight away, such as Occupy Wall Street and Glen Beck.

I know that; I'm just poking fun at you. :P

Try to be a little more obvious.

I haven't managed to read the entire discussion, only OP, so sorry if I repeat something here.

First, shouldn't this topic be taken to TSI's forum? http://seasteading.org/community/forums

Now, about OP, I don't like the nomadic nature of the proposition. Not having a fixed place makes many things too complicated. The main advantage I see is that you may try to run away from bad weather, but that also probably means that eventually you'll have to enter protected, territorial waters for that reason, and then your independence is gone.
It's better if you can resist bad weather, even on the deep ocean. But that's not for small ships. Even big ships shake as hell during a storm. As far as I've read on TSI's forum only semi-submersible or fully submersible structures can endure huge waves "calmly". Semi-submersibles (platforms) are very expensive, and submersibles are not... "conventional", but many people support it as the best way to go for seasteading: http://seasteading.org/interact/forums/research/engineering/permanently-submerged-concrete-structures-living-space-bubble-c

[registering]

 Seeing as this is the Bitcoin forum let's talk about internet at sea first.
SatPhones are expensive. Making calls via SatPhone regularly is pretty much out of the question.
But is SatInternet different? I looked into this. A gyroscopic dome costs $20,000. With that you can hook up to 2 way internet. Now, true VSAT in use on commercial shipping is very expensive. Can that tech be coupled to the cheaper SatInternet designed for rural areas?
In order to cut out the cost of that $20,000 I wondered if I could use an ordinary $400 satphone and just accept way lower speeds... but I couldn't figure out if the simcards would fit etc... anyone know? Even $10/mb prepay internet from a satphone might be useful to get emails. (p.s. need to sort that blockchain!!)

There's also packet radio but that's a can of worms.

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 Economics is the thing that stops this being bigger. Question: Might that change?

I work at sea and the basic answer to everything is carry a lot of diesel. With this you get aircon, heating, refridgeration, desalination and so on. Water is still a problem. Food isn't really an issue.

We are still more fish like than terrestrial animals. Our environment is the coastal environment. We should be able to survive at sea no problem. The fact that this doesn't already happen shows to me how little we know about the sea. It is easier to live in a quiet place instead.

I've looking into buying a boat to live on and the mooring fees along with all the new skills were what stop me doing it in normal situations. In order for it to work you are then paying for garbage disposal, electric and water. Unfortunately I found the market for these services was not big enough to generate low enough fees. All of these can be fixed but doing it well is harder than I wanted to risk life savings on.

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Don't want to bump but you can watch this related film from a crypto guy who lived at sea. The DVD is available if you want to give it as a present:
http://www.blueanarchy.org/holdfast/download.html

Satellites are not the only option if you are not nomadic. By keeping a roughly fixed position you can also add options like infrared, submarine cables, floating wireless routers etc. I don't know what's the best, but the people behind Blueseed (http://www.blueseed.co/) are doing some research on this topic since they'll need fast internet access.

VSAT equipment isn't that expensive.  Yeah gyroscopic dome mounts can go $5K to $20K but using crappy DirectWay terminal is still going to require a stable alignment.  Their terminals are pure garbage and only work w/ their birds.  Everyone else uses standardized components which can be programmed to work w/ a large variety of sats.  A standard terminal is going to run you about $2K.

When people say sat is expensive they mean compared to land based connectivity not impossibly expensive.

A C-band VSAT link runs about $2K to $3K per month for a 1 Mbps link (remember you pay both ways).  Ku band is about double that price (but does better in bad weather - less signal fade due to rain).  That gives you a rough idea of what a link is going to cost you.  That price may vary 30% or so depending on where you are, which sat you are connecting to, how large your dish is, how much bandwidth you are buying, preemption rights, etc.    With a dedicated link you are giving a timeslice, transponder frequency, and sat assignment and that time is yours.    Technically the sat is likely operating at 34Mbps so if you have a  1Mbps link then you are assigned ~3% of the timeslots.  So you are operating at 34Mbps 3% of the time = 1 Mbps effective.

To save money you can use contention.  Commercial sat is available in 5:1, 10:1, 20:1 or even 50:1 contention.  That just means multiple end points are sharing the same link. So with 10:1 contention if everyone is on at the same time well your 1Mbps link is going to feel like a 100kbps link.   A 20:1 contention link off NSS7 likely will run you $300 or so per month for 2Mbps down & 1Mbps up if you prepay a year.

Also remember your contract is w/ a single bird.  If you can't see it then you got no internet.  For example say you contracted for a link on NSS-7 North America spot beam (possibly useful for seasteading because it is used by caribbean nations for internet).  This is your roaming range

http://www.satsig.net/global-teleports/NSS-7-north-america-ku-spot-beam.jpg

If you want to sail around the world either that is going to require multiple contracts w/ multiple birds or some company to sell your contention across multiple birds.  You could use a sat phone but you are still going to pay $50 per month and about $10 per MB.  Good for emergencies though.

If you wonder where I learned all this ... got deployed to Iraq and our FOB ("base") had no general use internet connectivity.  If we wanted internet we needed to find our own. :)  We did.

Interesting.  It shows how having a "base station" opens up the options for seasteading.  Take a end of life semi-submersible drilling platform.  Retrofit it to have the essentials:
* electrical generation
* laser connectivity w/ mainland
* hospital facilities
* desalination & water storage
* food stores, cold storage, etc.

That becomes the nucleus for a larger community.

Yes, but the point I was making in the OP was that trying to build a foating city-state is going about it the wrong way.  The concept can only work if it starts with smaller communities and builds up to the point that a mostly stationary floating city-state is economicly sound, and then those that want such a thing will make it happen.  We already have the smallest of such communities, they just consist mostly of couples or families that tend to cluster around a particular marina.  They cluster because they need access to infrastruture that is expensive to provide for individual boats, as Interent service is one such example.  The central 'escort' boat can provide many of these infrastrucure resources while at sea, further reducing the individual family unit's dependency on shore provided resources, but cannot realisticly eliminate that dependency.  But the more time that you spend at sea, the cheaper the lifesype can be overall, because marina fees are no small part of your budget.  Interent costs can be shared by such a community by using marine quality wifi gear to connect to a sat uplink on the communty's escort ship, and save on bandwidth costs by using a squid server to cache those pretty pictures that everyone sees from facebook and the like.  The problem is only slightly more complicated at sea than for a remote African village trying to get connectivity for their schools.  A system similar to sailmail could also help to maintain a minimum level of connectivity while at sea too far from shore to reach a cell tower.  Although, with the right equipment mounted on the peak of the escort ship's mast, it's not unrealistic for a community to be beyond the international line and still get a bar; for cell towers are always mounted well high on the horizon and are designed to work to some considerable distance with tiny devices using low power outputs and terrible antennas.  I'd be willing to wager that the line of sight possible between an atenna mounted on a 70' tower and a high gain sector antenna mounted on the peak of a 40' mast is considerable.

http://www.calculatoredge.com/electronics/lineofsight.htm

According to that, line of sight is 21 miles.  If either the cell tower or the mast is higher, the los is farther.

Most people sailing around the world don't bother communicating with satellite phones.  Ham radio is much cheaper and easier to use.  The technology is decades old and yet still works great.  I have sent and received email from sailors over HF links using the WinLink2000 software (see http://www.winlink.org), and it really works quite well.  Granted, this is only for email, not full internet access, so it isn't really a complete solution for BlueSeed, but is an inexpensive step in the right direction.

If you want to see how many vessels are connected via Winlink worldwide, you can see a position map at http://www.winlink.org/userPositions.

Winlink (and ham radio) were also used extensively last May after a tornado destroyed a huge portion of Joplin, Missouri, and telephone communications were disrupted for the better part of a week.  Ham operators took the lead in establishing emergency communications systems to coordinate the relief effort.

We don't necessarily need state-of-the-art technology when the good old stuff still works pretty damned well.