I attended about 2/3 of the recent Seasteading conference. There were plenty of interesting people there. But I became less optimistic that seasteading will be implemented within the next decade.

The most discouraging news was that floating breakwaters probably won’t work with using propulsion to control location. They might work if anchored (which needs shallow water that only provides a little usable area outside territorial waters), and should still work with seasteads that drift were the currents take them (only suitable for people comfortable with being isolated).

The medical tourism ship business idea had last year seemed the most promising stepping stone on the way to seasteading. This year’s talk by Na’ama Moran on that subject provided better talking points that might be used to interest investors, but had nothing resembling a business plan. A year ago there was some hope that moderate changes to SurgiCruise‘s business plan could turn it into something viable. The seasteaders who were involved in that gave up on working with SurgiCruise recently, and no progress appears to have been made yet on creating an alternative.

I was also disappointed that she described no plans for dealing with the U.S. medical establishment’s ability to smear competitors. A company with no track record and weak regulation by, say, Panama can be made to sound dangerous to patients even if it provides care as good as U.S. hospitals. Could a medical cruise company hope to get accreditation early enough? There are large uncertainties about how much that costs and how soon it would be needed. I want a medical tourism company to prepare to demonstrate ways in which it provides higher quality care than U.S. hospitals (more on this in a later post).

Kevin Overman presented a vaguely promising idea for using RepRap and products from algae to build (print) structures at a cost that he hopes will be an order of magnitude less than with the materials currently envisioned to build a seastead. If he’s right, he should be able to make a nice profit building things on land before anyone is ready to build a seastead. The one drawback that I noticed is that it requires thicker structures (2X?) to get the same strength.

I also stopped by Ephemerisle for Saturday afternoon. It shows some promise as a competitor to Burning Man, but it’s unclear whether anything people learned there is related to skills needed to hold a festival in international waters. Possibly the design of the main platform can be adapted to the ocean without radical changes, but virtually all the other activity was done without any apparent regard for whether it could be repeated in the ocean.

When I first heard and read about Seasteading, I thought it was mostly well thought out, but that it hadn’t reached its goal of providing a business plan that would support a small group of non-wealthy people to set up the first seastead in international waters.
Now Peter Thiel has donated $500,000 to fund a new organization called The Seasteading Institute. My intuition is that it will take somewhere between $2 million and $20 million of charitable contributions to reach the threshold of resources needed for a seastead to become viable in international waters. But the first big donation is typically harder for a nonprofit to get than subsequent donations, and the size of this initial donation (with only a rudimentary organization) suggests that there’s a good chance that more money can be raised once more specific plans are developed and more people indicate commitments to implement them.