Prizes
Criteria for a good prize
Peter Diamandis discusses How to Design an X PRIZE.
Design goals
- sea-bound -- stays out at sea indefinitely (no or rare docking)
- longevity -- 100+ year lifespan
- semi-stationary -- stays within roughly the same region of the sea
- spacious -- lots of space per passenger, relative to boats
- wave-resistant -- little wave motion under normal conditions; can survive rogue waves
- higher passenger duty cycle -- most passengers expect to live on seasteads fulltime
- multi-purpose -- designed to house all of the same businesses as exist on land (dentist office, grocery stores, etc.)
- modular -- can combine with each other to form larger structures
Given those design goals, some of the criteria we might consider for a prize:
- Cost - Can you build the seastead under $X dollars
- Station keeping -- Can the seastead inside a circle of x-radius for y period of time?
- Ease of construction -- Can a single person with a pickup struck and readily available tools build it?
- Comfort -- Does the seastead bob no more than X when waves are height Y?
- Safety -- Can the seastead tolerate waves of height X without excessive damage?
- Modularity -- Can the seastead be easily combined with other seasteads to form a larger structure? Does it tile?
- Spaciousness -- Does the seastead provide at least X sq feet of living space?
Non-design goals
Perhaps we should also think about explicitly what are _not_design criteria:
- size - no max on size
- weight - doesn't matter how much it weighs (although individual parts must be transportable by pickup)
- speed - does have to move more than 5 mph
- build-speed - doesn't matter how long it takes to build
- does not have to be energy or food self-sufficient; food and fuel re-supplies are allowed. (Although perhaps we should make this a criteria for the prize, even though seasteads would not need to be self-sufficient).
