Floating Cities, No Longer Science Fiction, Begin to Take Shape

NY Times ^ | November 13, 2017 | David Gelles

[mairdie]

...Long the stuff of science fiction, so-called "seasteading" has in recent years matured from pure fantasy into something approaching reality, and there are now companies, academics, architects and even a government working together on a prototype by 2020.

At the center of the effort is the Seasteading Institute, a nonprofit organization based in San Francisco. Founded in 2008, the group has spent about a decade trying to convince the public that seasteading is not an entirely crazy idea.

...The project is being partially funded by an initial coin offering, a new concept sweeping Silicon Valley and Wall Street in which money can be raised by creating and selling virtual currency.

[mairdie]

I keep thinking hurricanes and pirates.

[Vaquero]

And tsunamis

[a fool in paradise]

And here liberals were worried sbout Guam tipping over.

[mairdie]

Maybe you just ride them out in the personal submarine you keep in your underwater garage.

[mairdie]

Now you’re making me worried that being home means being seasick.

[grobdriver]

Water World!

[Morpheus2009]

I think having a city on the bottom of the ocean is even better. Out in the Atlantic and under a lighthouse.

[wally_bert]

As long as there are failsafe ways up to the surface, ok.

[Little Pig]

Tsunamis wouldn’t have any impact at all on a floating city, unless it was so close to shore that it ended up run aground during a tsunami’s initial retreat from the shore. Tsunamis at sea are rarely more than a couple of feet high, and their peak-to-trough is so long you wouldn’t notice them at all.

Now, rogue waves on the other hand would be a serious hazard. However, the benefit to a floating city is that it can be moved to avoid all but the largest areas of heavy seas.

[ETL]

[mairdie]

We’ll leave the light on.

Or maybe just so you remember where you left your house.

[Vaquero]

True. Folks vacationing in Phuket etc in 2004 who were offshore barely felt the tsunami.

[Getready]

....barnacles...rust..fungus....rogue waves..high winds..heavy rains..seagull poop...mercury poisoning...salt water corrosion..contagious infections ...and then typical human destructive behaviour always follows....the next mystery novel will follow asking why were all these dead people found in this seasteading structure?

[mairdie]

Those are magnificent, ETL. I could almost imagine walking on one. I tried to go onto my brother’s sailboat and lost it midway up the gangplank. I prefer modes of transportation that you could walk away from if something went wrong.

[mairdie]

>>the next mystery novel will follow asking why were all these dead people found in this seasteading structure?

The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes has him investigating a submarine accident. Maybe he could expand his inquiry.

I'm reminded by the various pastiches, like Seven Percent Solution, that finding a lost memoir in the attic wasn't original to Sherlock Holmes fans. Henry Livingston (Night Before Christmas) wrote about finding a diary of Alexander the Great in an attic and published excerpts from it in 1793 in the New-York Magazine.

Journal of an Asiatic Expedition attempted by me, Alexander the son of Olympia, (and perhaps the son of Philip.)

446th Olympiad, June 23. Eight o'clock in the evening. Confoundedly tired with marching through this sun-burnt oriental country. A puddle of fresh water is a natural curiosity, and my canteen is half full of sediment. But the hope of filling our knapsacks with Persian gold keeps us from repining. I mean to measure my mattrass in less than an hour, and if that slut Thais keeps me in bed till six o'clock to-morrow morning, I'll know why. There is no campaigning with or without these trollops.

24th. Ten in the morning. Just finished reviewing my troops -- Adjutant-general Parmenio is as formal as his old maiden sister -- to receive and return the salutes of a thousand fellows is worse than to be engaged in a decent skirmish. I ever hated ceremony. Give me a girl, a bottle, and a battle, sans souci.

25th. Three in the afternoon. My scouts have this moment come in and inform, that I can easily reach the banks of the Granicus in two hours; and that the Persians, gay as gems and gold can make them, and numerous as locusts, line the eastern shore as far as the eye can reach. My men expect a scratch, but I and Darius's general perfectly understand each other. I have promised him a province when I shake his hand at Babylon, and I know the coward will rely upon me. I am to make the onset with great play fury, and he is to retreat as ostentatiously as he pleases.

--Seven o'clock. Well, the farce is over, and we Invincible Macedonians have got the Granicus in our rear! My opponent behaved pretty well; although he ought to have pretended resistence a little longer than he did. I believe the rascal thought more than once that we were in earnest. I will give one of the half starved poets that hang upon me, a pistareen and mug of grog, to describe this days' bustling as a battle of amazing magnitude: Paint Bucephalus as plunging thro' the foaming current, and bearing me resistless at the head of thirty thousand veterans on a foe, valiant, tho' unequal -- describe the eagle of victory hovering over my helmet -- and the Fates fainting onthe shore. The fools of posterity perhaps may read the nonsense and believe it. ...

[tinyowl]

Also you can only have so many military troops on one side of the island. The Georgia congressman was just in early.

[mairdie]

And if they all march in cadence, what then? More seasickness?

[DoodleBob]

I'd rather go the other way.

[treetopsandroofs]

[treetopsandroofs]

4 seconds, but yours isn’t floating. :-)