Single Family Seastead

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Revision as of 00:56, 28 November 2009 by Ellmer (talk | contribs) (Arguments In Favor)
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The Single Family Seastead is one of the types of Seastead. The key idea is that a structure engineered for a family to live on the open ocean could be better optimized for this goal than anything else. It should "beat a boat" in terms of space, stability, and cost.


Arguments In Favor

  1. See also Vince Seasteading Views.
  2. We already have several plausible designs for single family seasteads that could be parked in deep water and still be stable enough for the residents to work and live. This is not reasonable in a regular small boat. So it is a game changer.
  3. A single family seastead should take less capital to startup than other seastead plans.
  4. These are much more stable than the boats that many families already travel around the world in.
  5. There is at least a niche market for families who want to live on the water.
  6. A SFS lets each family decide where they want to go, so dynamic geography works at a fine granularity.
  7. There is no need for new government structures at the start as each SFS can just get some country flag like any yacht.
  8. It is probably easier to tile together lighter weight SFS than large seasteads.
  9. More "incremental" than others and so has a better chance of working. As the number of SFSs grows stores and such will pop up and life in the flotilla will become more interesting so there will be less need for each SFS to visit land.
  10. With many small seasteads some could hold guns in international waters while others visited land.
  11. SFS could be specifically designed to stay on water and not depend on a marina and harbor infrastructure. Concrete shell structures would be a ideal platform - they have a maintenance free service life of 200 years in marine ambient so once floated out they could stay there for ever. Example of a "floating lens family seastead" [1] that kind of structures could be produced at the cost of the average US and European housing market (331 Euro/ton of displacement) - they could be surface floating, semi submerged, or submarine like, see the example of the 200ton (68 squaremeter apartment equivalent) blimp shape submarine habitat [2] so they could adapat to a wide range of different seasteading tastes.

Arguments Against

  1. Something just incrementally better than a boat might not change things much.
  2. Designing a whole new type of structure adds risk to the venture.
  3. Without tiling together, it might be too isolated for most people.