User:Jesrad
Jesrad is a diplomed Systems and Networks engineer, a certified Discordian Pope and an enthusiastic amateur lateral-thinker.
Work in progress:
Contents
Land and sea cost to surface comparisons
While the cost of the residential square meter of seastead may compare favorably to the cost of residential square meter of downtown flats in many big cities, any attempt at designing seasteads with cost in mind should integrate also comparisons of non-residential acreage in both settings.
Land residents in big cities have easy access to such non-residential land surface through the extensive land transportation systems: the ordinary western citizen makes use of the following averages of surfaces depending on their productive uses:
- N square meter for crop culture
- M square meter for stock breeding and rising
- O square meter for industrial applications
- P square meter for refuse and waste treatment or storage
- Q square meter for ?
- Your Ad Here
The weighted average of the total cost of land for each such person is (formula here), which is, for actual competitive purposes when comparing traditional land lifestyle against seasteads, a more accurate target for design-to-cost approaches.
The Floating Dirt seastead
Dirt is extremely cheap. Therefore, if dirt can be given positive buoyancy, then floating dirt may make floating islands cheap enough.
The principle behind the Floating Dirt Seastead is to mash together ideas like the Artificial Atoll, the Mud Curtain and the Disposable Land proposals, in order to make a large floating, artificial island to settle upon.
Comparison with ordinary islands
Settling an island is an established possibility for homesteading the seas, however it usually comes with several disadvantages in the mid- and long-term:
- Isolation from the continent means higher prices on imports and exports
- Very limited expansion ability as, once the entire island is developped there is no more land available
The Floating Dirt seastead carefully avoids these two problems: by being mobile, it can be brought to the continent for the purpose of reducing import and export costs semi-permanently or on a regular schedule ; and by being artificial it can be easily expanded by producing and adding more floating dirt to the ensemble.
Therefore, a Floating Dirt seastead should be able to combine the comparative advantages islands have as a cadre of living, without incurring their disadvantages.
Design constraints
A Floating Dirt seastead should be robust enough to survive the ocanic environment and its severe storms either by resisting wind and waves directly, or by being able to take damage from those. The latter solution is preferred so as to focus on the one main characteristic of this seastead design: dirt-cheap artificial land. To this effect the Floating Dirt seastead is made of two parts: the inhabitable main "land", and its breakwater/atoll. The former is destined to shoulder wave damage, while the latter aims at resisting wind damage. The main component of the floating dirt itself has to be made from a material that resists corrosion from seawater.
Taking wave damage gracefully
Tbd
Resisting wind damage cheaply
The simplest method for resisting wind is to use a low profile with a reduced frontal surface exposed to wind and a low drag coefficient. Another possibility is to use something to dampen or deflect the effect of wind, for example vegetation or artificial hills.
Combining infrastructure and structure
- Floatation can be obtained from fresh water, which is lighter than salt water, so fresh water tanks should be incorporated into the floating dirt structure, possibly deep under the water level so that Archimedes' force works to provide pressure in the pipes without requiring a water tower - vulnerable to wind and destabilising.
Notes on this design
By taking the more traditional shape of an actual island, instead of near-boat or near-oil-rig shapes, this design might make it easier for the rest of the world to treat it as an independant piece of land and not a boat sailing under some existing nation's flag, in turn making it easier to have the independant sovereignty of its inhabitants recognized internationally. This might prove invaluable when moving through territorial (or claimed as such) waters. The legal arrangements reserved for embassies would ideally apply when the floating island stops by a port.
Maximising the total size against the total value of the seastead discourages structural attacks. It is easy for an hostile navy to try and sink a boat-like seastead (or group of such seasteads), but no one in his right mind would attempt to sink an island. Additionnally, a design that can shrug off damage from large storms can most probably shrug off damage from air bombings too.
