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Welcome to TSI's January 2009 Newsletter. As the staff, membership, and worldwide interest in seasteading keep growing, we continue to have more and more for you each month. Our December 2008 was packed, and with January's Wired Magazine feature on seasteading and the patent filing and preliminary engineering reports for our first seastead design, January was even busier!
Key Accomplishments
Key Needs (complete list)
Work on smaller seasteads has been postponed in order to wrap up the large seastead design, but we plan to get started on it soon. One area of active discussion is whether the best path to a prototype (StudioStead) is to:
Build a scaled-down version of ClubStead which could not survive in the open ocean and is not correct from an engineering sense (because the spar platform design does not scale down well, partly because waves don't scale down), but would require minimal additional engineering work, and would visually represent our large design, and do fine in the Bay and perhaps in low waves near the coast. (A BayStead).
Design and build something in our proposed "Single-Family Seastead" category - essentially an ocean-worthy floating home. This is more expensive because we would have to start from scratch, but we would be building a real, operable seastead prototype that could be operated in the open ocean.
CNET - The next frontier: 'Seasteading' the oceans. Declan McCullagh, who came to the SF social, wrote this well-researched piece which includes quotes from David Boaz and Jason Sorens. My favorite bit:
One way to look at the prospect of colonizing the oceans is that it represents the continuation of a westward trend that began with Greece and continued through Rome, Gaul, Britain, and the North American continent. "When people got to California that was as far west as they could go," said David Boaz, executive vice president of the Cato Institute, a free-market think tank in Washington, D.C. "Maybe this will turn out to be an opportunity to revive that search for a frontier."
Patri was interviewed for a Discovery Channel appearance to air in late spring or early summer.