The quest for space interference free
The quest for space
70 % of the planet surface is water, 99% of the planets habitable space volume is water, we can not use more of the scarce land for megacieties, production units, cement slabs, agriculture production, as we do at the moment - we are already causing a severe mass extinction due to the shere volume of human activities on the planets dry surface.
f you think in the blue planet as a spaceship and species as “rivets that hold the life support together” rivets are popping out on a alarming rate already.
GENEVA (Reuters) – The world populations of fish, birds, mammals, amphibians and reptiles fell overall by 52 percent between 1970 and 2010,… more here
The only places left to make space for more human activities without doing more damage to the biosphere is under earth, in the planets waterbody, and in outer space.
So we should expect a LOT of human activity in the Ocean (which is the most feasible of the three options) in the decades to come. Floating real estate, floating production sites, floating fish farms, all this is not a exotic option any longer - there is just no way around it anymore.
The technology that will pave the way for human settlement and human activity at sea is concrete honeycomb and shell building.
Before we can build ELYSIUM in earth orbit - we need to accomodate a lot of human activities ambient neutral in the “planetary hydrosphere” - the most economic way to enclose living space is a sphere - the ocean facilitates the building of concrete spheres - and other shells while the natural shape for building on land is a box (easy crane handling of the building process due to straight walls) a floating building site allows shell building much better (see Rion-Antirion pylon building process here as a basic “how to do” model.)
Marine Concrete Engineering
Concrete has clearly emerged as the most economical and durable material for the building of the vast majority of marine structures. Reinforced concrete too has overcome the technological problems making it a suitable material for the construction of advanced marine structures such as offshore drilling platforms, superspan bridges and undersea tunnels. As the world becomes increasingly ocean-oriented for energy and other resources it is predicted that construction activities during the 21st century will be dominated by concrete sea structures. The performance of concrete in the marine environment is presented here in a logical manner giving state-of-the-art reviews of the nature of the marine environment, the composition and properties of concrete, history of concrete performance in seawater, major causes of deterioration of concrete in the marine environment, selection of materials and mix proportioning for durable concrete, recommended concrete practice and repair of deteriorated marine structures. It is of value to any design or construction engineer responsible for marine structures.
Concrete in the Marine Environment (Modern Concrete Technology)
Equilibrium on the Planet
The quest for space is closely related with the “need of global equilibrium” it is clear that our society as it is today is taking too much from the biosphere causing climate change and mass extinctions.
The problem anybody is talking about CO2 and fossil fuels producing global warming can be solved quite easyly by developing new technology like solar. The real problem - that is not easy to solve is the development of the human world population and its exploding need for space goods and services.
It has been suggested to “cut back human population” with the Chineese model (one child per couple and heavy state control). But this is not feasible in a “free world” it reqires a world of George Orwells 1985 .
So the question is where can we “make space” for the “expanding needs of humanity” reducing at the same time impact over the amazon jungle, European alpine valleys, and similar delicate biotops.
The only feasible answer is “in outer space” and “inner space” - until we are capable to reach outer space - the planets liquid mantle contains 99% of the space volume available to humanity.
Affortunatly the open ocean is a “biological quite empty” volume which is REALLY big. Placing big structures there, that carter to human needs, is not harming an existing eco sistem - on contrary it is creating a surface for a reef community to prosper (see marine life on oil rig legs and other human objects placed into the ocean).
This is why the OCEAN SPHERE will give us the “room and time necessary” to come to the point where we can take off in space colonies without touching the human core values of freedom, wanting more and a better life, free procreation, entrepeneurship, and interference freedom and still avoid to destroy the planet in the path of this explosive demographic, technological, and economical development, happening right now in front of our noses.
How do you build a new hotel when there is no space left to build it …
This 200 million five star hotel found a solution - no land no problem.
http://concretesubmarine.activeboard.com/t55879873/superyacht-superhotel/
Floating industrial construction - interference free space on the water. Logistics is easier on the water because heavy items can float to the building site by barge. No building plot is necessary to buy. No city building code needs to be included into the project.
Offshoring the megatrend of the century
We live in a world where half of all money is offshore already, tycoons like Abramovic and Branson are “offshoring” their private life and tax declarations, Google is offshoring data centers to get rid of state interference in their business, it can be easyly predicted that at the end all buisness all money all data, will be taken out of interference of politics and states and in one form or another be “offshored”.
The final point of the “offshoring movement” is Captain Nemo, doing business worldwide from a yacht that governments and other interferers could not even spot and interfere if they wanted. Eclipse is still visible to everybody every time it goes for a port, it can still be boarded it can still be grounded by authorities in a port. Nautilus is already out of this dilemma - it can not be spotted, it can not be boarded, it can not be grounded in any reasonably possible and feasible operation. It converts the personal living space bubble of a individual into something that is private and off radar in the same way as a numbered offshore account gets money “off radar” and invisible.
The whole idea of offshoring has many times been discredited as a “safe haven for criminal activity” - but this is mere negative propaganda of the proponents of the nanny and big brother state. Privacy is a basic right and going off radar is just implementing your rights in the real world. It is not even new - the people who went to the new world as pioneers “offshored” their religion and business from interference in Europe. Today there is no land left to do that - for going off radar you best go oceanic technology makes it feasible.
You are here: why going oceanic is next big thing to come in business
More on the topic offshoring (in the sense of going out of jurisdiction) megatrend of the century
he interference freedom scale of 1-10 read more here
“I believe that politics is way too intense. That’s why I’m a libertarian. Politics gets people angry, destroys relationships, and polarizes peoples’ vision: the world is us versus them; good people versus the other. Politics is about interfering with other people’s lives without their consent. That’s probably why, in the past, libertarians have made little progress in the political sphere. Thus, I advocate focusing energy elsewhere, onto peaceful projects that some consider utopian.”
Peter Thiel
www.cato-unbound.org/2009/05/01/peter-thiel/suffrage-isnt-danger-other-rights-are
concretesubmarine.activeboard.com/t56239662/oceanic-concrete-sphere-habitat/
As Michael Strong writes in his new book Be The Solution, we should “Criticize By Creating.”
The Education of a Libertarian
Peter Thiel
I remain committed to the faith of my teenage years: to authentic human freedom as a precondition for the highest good. I stand against confiscatory taxes, totalitarian collectives, and the ideology of the inevitability of the death of every individual. For all these reasons, I still call myself “libertarian.”
But I must confess that over the last two decades, I have changed radically on the question of how to achieve these goals. Most importantly, I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible. By tracing out the development of my thinking, I hope to frame some of the challenges faced by all classical liberals today.
As a Stanford undergraduate studying philosophy in the late 1980s, I naturally was drawn to the give-and-take of debate and the desire to bring about freedom through political means. I started a student newspaper to challenge the prevailing campus orthodoxies; we scored some limited victories, most notably in undoing speech codes instituted by the university. But in a broader sense we did not achieve all that much for all the effort expended. Much of it felt like trench warfare on the Western Front in World War I; there was a lot of carnage, but we did not move the center of the debate. In hindsight, we were preaching mainly to the choir — even if this had the important side benefit of convincing the choir’s members to continue singing for the rest of their lives.
As a young lawyer and trader in Manhattan in the 1990s, I began to understand why so many become disillusioned after college. The world appears too big a place. Rather than fight the relentless indifference of the universe, many of my saner peers retreated to tending their small gardens. The higher one’s IQ, the more pessimistic one became about free-market politics — capitalism simply is not that popular with the crowd. Among the smartest conservatives, this pessimism often manifested in heroic drinking; the smartest libertarians, by contrast, had fewer hang-ups about positive law and escaped not only to alcohol but beyond it.
As one fast-forwards to 2009, the prospects for a libertarian politics appear grim indeed. Exhibit A is a financial crisis caused by too much debt and leverage, facilitated by a government that insured against all sorts of moral hazards — and we know that the response to this crisis involves way more debt and leverage, and way more government. Those who have argued for free markets have been screaming into a hurricane. The events of recent months shatter any remaining hopes of politically minded libertarians. For those of us who are libertarian in 2009, our education culminates with the knowledge that the broader education of the body politic has become a fool’s errand.
Indeed, even more pessimistically, the trend has been going the wrong way for a long time. To return to finance, the last economic depression in the United States that did not result in massive government intervention was the collapse of 1920–21. It was sharp but short, and entailed the sort of Schumpeterian “creative destruction” that could lead to a real boom. The decade that followed — the roaring 1920s — was so strong that historians have forgotten the depression that started it. The 1920s were the last decade in American history during which one could be genuinely optimistic about politics. Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women — two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians — have rendered the notion of “capitalist democracy” into an oxymoron.
In the face of these realities, one would despair if one limited one’s horizon to the world of politics. I do not despair because I no longer believe that politics encompasses all possible futures of our world. In our time, the great task for libertarians is to find an escape from politics in all its forms — from the totalitarian and fundamentalist catastrophes to the unthinking demos that guides so-called “social democracy.”
The critical question then becomes one of means, of how to escape not via politics but beyond it. Because there are no truly free places left in our world, I suspect that the mode for escape must involve some sort of new and hitherto untried process that leads us to some undiscovered country; and for this reason I have focused my efforts on new technologies that may create a new space for freedom. Let me briefly speak to three such technological frontiers:
(1) Cyberspace. As an entrepreneur and investor, I have focused my efforts on the Internet. In the late 1990s, the founding vision of PayPal centered on the creation of a new world currency, free from all government control and dilution — the end of monetary sovereignty, as it were. In the 2000s, companies like Facebook create the space for new modes of dissent and new ways to form communities not bounded by historical nation-states. By starting a new Internet business, an entrepreneur may create a new world. The hope of the Internet is that these new worlds will impact and force change on the existing social and political order. The limitation of the Internet is that these new worlds are virtual and that any escape may be more imaginary than real. The open question, which will not be resolved for many years, centers on which of these accounts of the Internet proves true.
(2) Outer space. Because the vast reaches of outer space represent a limitless frontier, they also represent a limitless possibility for escape from world politics. But the final frontier still has a barrier to entry: Rocket technologies have seen only modest advances since the 1960s, so that outer space still remains almost impossibly far away. We must redouble the efforts to commercialize space, but we also must be realistic about the time horizons involved. The libertarian future of classic science fiction, à la Heinlein, will not happen before the second half of the 21st century.
(3) Seasteading. Between cyberspace and outer space lies the possibility of settling the oceans. To my mind, the questions about whether people will live there (answer: enough will) are secondary to the questions about whether seasteading technology is imminent. From my vantage point, the technology involved is more tentative than the Internet, but much more realistic than space travel. We may have reached the stage at which it is economically feasible, or where it soon will be feasible. It is a realistic risk, and for this reason I eagerly support this initiative.
The future of technology is not pre-determined, and we must resist the temptation of technological utopianism — the notion that technology has a momentum or will of its own, that it will guarantee a more free future, and therefore that we can ignore the terrible arc of the political in our world.
A better metaphor is that we are in a deadly race between politics and technology. The future will be much better or much worse, but the question of the future remains very open indeed. We do not know exactly how close this race is, but I suspect that it may be very close, even down to the wire. Unlike the world of politics, in the world of technology the choices of individuals may still be paramount. The fate of our world may depend on the effort of a single person who builds or propagates the machinery of freedom that makes the world safe for capitalism.
For this reason, all of us must wish Patri Friedman the very best in his extraordinary experiment.
http://www.cato-unbound.org/2009/04/13/peter-thiel/education-libertarian