Seasteading allows people to live on the ocean detached from the burdens of land-based life. Bringing together libertarians, science fiction fans, and engineers, there's a place in the seasteading community for everyone. On this episode of Campfire, Jackson sat down with Carly Jackson, the Development Director of the Seasteading Institute. The two of them chatted about what seasteading is, why it’s important, the legal landscape around it, and the practical considerations before launching a seastead. If you’re interested in how cities can exist off of land, this is definitely an episode to check out!
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Topics Covered:
Introduction to Seasteading — (2:00)
The History of Seasteading — (2:54)
The Fans of Seasteading — (3:57)
Carly’s Interest in Seasteading — (6:17)
The Technology behind Seasteading — (7:55)
The Various Approaches to Seasteading— (10:31)
What Seasteading Communities Could Produce — (12:42)
What the Seasteading Institute Does and Seasteading Autonomy — (15:28)
Countries and Flagging Registries — (18:35)
Panama’s Flagging Registry — (19:55)
Pirates and Safety — (20:55)
Seasteading Design — (24:50)
Product Cities — (27:00)
O-Tech Core Technologies — (27:57)
The Size of Seasteading Communities — (28:40)
The Eight Great Moral Imperatives of Seasteading — (29:35)
Want to learn more about what new technologies are waiting to be released? Follow us on Twitter or join our Discord to find out what's in store for us and how we make use of Web3 in both digital and physical space. See you at the next Campfire 🏕️🔥.
Episode Links:
Carly on LinkedIn
Seasteading Today Podcast (Spotify)
The Seasteading Institute on Twitter
The Seasteading Institute’s Website
Episode Credit:
Hosted by @JacksonSteger
Sound Engineering by @Prodcolin
Videos and Clips by @McdonnellCallum
Produced by @PhilippeIze
Distribution by @Alisonclaire and @PhilippeIze
[00:00:00] Jackson Steger: Hi everyone, this is Jackson Steger, and you're listening to Season 2 of Campfire. Let's get it.
[00:00:08] This season of Campfire seeks to understand how to build new cities. Each week we are joined by experts and practitioners from different startup cities who will share the stories and lessons that they have learned from experimenting with radical new models of living. Cabin is building its own network city, which you can learn more about by visiting www.creatorcabins.com or by following us @CreatorCabins.
[00:00:30] Today's guest is Carly Jackson, Director of Development for the Seasteading Institute. Seasteading refers to building startup communities that float on the ocean with any measure of political autonomy. The Seasteading Institute's mission is to educate the public about seasteading, as well as to support aquapreneurs to actively work on projects that will help humanity build floating, politically autonomous, environmentally restorative cities.
[00:00:56] This episode felt very holistic, and I had a blast recording it. You can see me smile if you watch the video version. And we discussed this tech stack for floating cities, the major players in seasteading, moral imperatives for building new kinds of cities, and much, much more. Before recording, I knew next to nothing about seasteading, and I walked away feeling like I had of a solid grasp on the industry landscaper, rather the seascape. And I hope that you enjoy listening as much as I did recording it. Thanks.
[00:01:27] Carly Jackson, welcome to Campfire.
[00:01:30] Carly Jackson: Thank you for having me.
[00:01:31] Jackson Steger: Other than being a fan of your last name, I'm also a fan of your podcast and all the things that you do over at the Seasteading Institute. Cabin is building its own kind of city, but we have only yet talked to either land-based entities or more cloud-oriented online-based entities. And so, you're the first person that we've had on the show to talk about seasteading. And to that end, I would love to just start with some definitions and some history. So, what is seasteading?
[00:02:05] Carly Jackson: So, seasteading is building floating, eco-restorative, politically autonomous communities out on the ocean. So, there are a few levels to that. All of those points are equally important to us, the being eco-restorative, floating, and then also the autonomy. But there's a wide range within each of those criteria. The Seasteading Institute supports projects that are working towards those goals, but we don't have any strict requirements for a seasteading project, whether they’re projects that want to do single-family homes that sort of float individually, and then there are projects that want to build huge floating cities, and we support all of that and everything in between.
[00:02:50] Jackson Steger: Really appreciate that. I'm really curious how this got started. Who was the first person who thought that seasteading was a good idea? Are there historical precedents for seasteading?
[00:03:02] Carly Jackson: There are absolutely historical precedents. There are many sort of indigenous cultures that have had floating societies. There's one in Mexico City. There are floating communities in Thailand and other parts of Asia. And I couldn't tell you who the first seasteader was, but I can tell you the Seasteading Institute was started almost 15 years ago. Wayne Gramlich is credited with naming the Seasteading Institute, and Patri Friedman is the person who put the organization together, and he worked to get some funding and create our nonprofit organization with the goal of educating the public about the technology, doing the research to find proofs of concepts and get funding together and just coordinate an effort to get seasteading happening.
[00:03:52] Jackson Steger: Yeah, you mentioned all these different geographies that have through one way or another beyond their own seasteading communities. What kind of person, irrespective of geography, is attracted to seasteading?
[00:04:04] Carly Jackson: So, most of our community comes from a libertarian perspective, of people who are completely tired of the political fight. One of our taglines is ‘Stop arguing and start seasteading’. So the idea behind that is rather than having this decades long battle to get incremental change in policy in the country where you live, if we can go out beyond any territory to have an innovative society where people can organize communities according to whatever structure that they think will work best, and then you will have sort of a marketplace of different kinds of governance structures and people can choose what works best for themselves. We expect that we'll also have an influence on existing countries, when they see what works and what doesn't, to borrow from our innovative marketplace and governance.
[00:04:58] So, most of our community comes to us from that journey of being tired of having to fight every little legislative battle and just wanting to try out new ways of governance. We also have a large community of people who are interested in technological innovation, people who want to develop new aquaculture practices or new ways of generating energy. They find that the regulatory burden to get new technologies approved and scaled up is strangling them. So, having an opportunity to go try different kinds of technology out on the ocean and see what works, I mean that's true of people who are interested in new medical technology doing research on the ocean, the deep ocean. And then there are the folks who are interested in the environmental aspect of it, building a home that is actually eco-restorative, that actually creates a better environment for wildlife. If you are growing seaweed, you are helping to generate oxygen for the Earth, and you can capture carbon that way and grow fish population. So, there's a lot, there’s so much potential in many different directions of human development and flourishing.
[00:06:12] Jackson Steger: I love how there's so many different reasons why one might be attracted to those communities. What about you, what was the thing for you that Carly Jackson saw and held onto and has inspired you throughout the time that you've been with the institute?
[00:06:27] Carly Jackson: I was a political activist and remember working with a married couple who were activists. And I just admired them so much. They had done so much good in our city. But I remember talking to them and they said, oh, we've been doing this for 20 years. And while that's admiral, I just didn't feel like I wanted to give 20 years of my life of not getting paid a decent salary and constantly having to watch what's going on at the city council or the state legislature. Not even talking about national politics because that's even more work.
[00:07:03] So, I was just thinking about local politics, and I was like, man, this is asking too much of me for my life. So then around that time I learned about intentional communities, I learned about seasteading, and the ‘stop arguing start seasteading’ really appealed to me. I'm also a fan of science fiction and have been my whole life. And so, you see these beautiful renderings of what future floating cities could look like and the opportunity to work with scientists and engineers who are making those reality was really cool too. I love talking to the engineers, because they can't, I don't know if this is an okay thing to say, they can't bullshit you basically. Engineers, you have to deal with physics, and physics does not bend to will or rhetoric. It's physics, and I love that part of my job too.
[00:07:51] Jackson Steger: Yeah. Let's go down that sci-fi rabbit hole for a second. Like are there in these, like renderings you've seen or in stories that you might have read, a) I guess I'm curious which kinds of stories were these inspiring things to you. But then also in your conversations with some of these engineers and physicists, what, if anything, has surprised you that is possible and is a really cool tech component to how seasteading works that is in line with how maybe sci-fi authors have imagined it in years past?
[00:08:23] Carly Jackson: Yeah. Most of the science fiction that I can think of is space travel. And as a side note, I'm actually launching a novelist program to encourage people to write novels about seasteading just to build public imagination around the whole idea, because we have a lot of science fiction about space. We don't have a lot about seasteading. So, I'm working on that too.
[00:08:45] So with seasteading, one of the things that surprised me was learning about Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion, OTEC. We call it OTEC. And there are a few chapters about it in the seasteading book, and it's a way of generating energy by pumping cold water from down below into a turbine, it reacts with the warm water at the surface, and turns the turbine to generate energy. And in other terms, you call it like a waste product. One of the waste products is freshwater. So, it's super clean. And also, you can bring up, most of the ocean is a desert because you have nutrients sink far below where sunlight can reach and living creatures have to have access to sunlight. Plankton has to have access to sunlight. So, if you're pumping up cold water, you can also pump up those nutrients that can feed surface level plankton which then feeds algae and feeds fish. So, you can also farm seaweed and fish by generating energy. And there's a very high startup cost for OTEC, but once it's started, it's a very low-cost form of energy generation.
[00:10:00] And one of the things is there is an OTEC plant in Hawaii, but one of the major costs is pumping that energy back to land. If you're living on the ocean, you don't have to take that transactional cost of pumping that energy back to land. So, it will take quite a bit of development to find people who can put the capital investment to that kind of project, but it's really cool and exciting.
[00:10:22] Jackson Steger: Yeah, that's awesome. And I think we’ll have some more OTEC questions in a bit. But I want to help still just better understand the landscape first. So, on the Seasteading Institute's website, you use this phrase “aquapreneurs” to describe some of the entrepreneurial people leading some of the seasteading projects, which I love. And as I was doing some Googling, it seemed floating was the very specific component of the seasteading landscape. But what are the major categories or business models or approaches to seasteading? Like are they all floating? Are there some that cruise? Are there other categories I'm not naming here? Just, yeah, what are the different approaches to seasteading?
[00:11:02] Carly Jackson: We certainly support seasteaders who just want to live on a boat. There are quite a few people there. But you can do that now. You don't need a nonprofit to argue for your political rights and your technological development to do that. Certainly happy to support seasteaders who just live on a boat. We do have a video on our YouTube channel, and that answers the question on why not just live on a boat. If you're just traveling from place to place, unless you're transporting goods, it's a cost, right? You're not making a living, just living on a boat. If you're homesteading on land, you're growing food, you're trying to be self-sufficient. But if you're on a boat moving, I don't see a lot of pathways for being self-sufficient. You have to already be economically self-sufficient.
[00:11:46] So, when you're stable in one place on a seastead, you can have a farm on the ocean just like you would on land, and you can trade. And so, that's why we lean towards floating and not sailing, because the economic development happens when you can stay in one place and actually develop at your location basically. Did that answer your question?
[00:12:05] Jackson Steger: That's super helpful. Yes and no. I have more related questions, but yeah, it does answer the like why is floating so key to the definition. So, within floating, you mentioned having these like self-sufficient economies. In Cabin, and on this podcast, we've talked about Jane Jacobs and import replacement theory, this idea that cities or politically autonomous groups is better for them to, instead of importing goods and services, to produce those goods and services. You mentioned farming, but what are common exports, or at least things produced in seasteading ecosystems that maybe some seasteading enterprises have had success selling or trading or sending elsewhere?
[00:12:54] Carly Jackson: It's mostly theoretical right now. We're working on having our first communities out there, so that we can test these out and see how well they work in the real world. But one thing that is a low-hanging fruit is data storage or crypto mining. You keep your servers underwater, easier to keep them cool. So that kind of information resource could be a way to generate revenue on a seastead. Farming could be huge, fish farming and seaweed farming. So, we'd like to see seaweed become more of a commodity. It is already, it's a growing sector of our consumer economy. Like there's seaweed in cosmetics, in food. And so, we'd like to see Americans especially eating more seaweed to grow that sort of market and demand for it.
[00:13:42] But yeah, growing seaweed kelp is extremely fast growing. There are many different aspects of seaweed, many different use cases, for fibers, for all sorts of materials. And also fish. One of my favorite people I've interviewed on my podcast is Neil Sims, who has a new kind of fish farm that's like a floating cage, and it sort of removes all of the negative externalities of fish farms. So, if fish farms tend to collect a lot of waste, you have your fish closely packed together. So, parasites can spread more easily and other diseases. So, his fish farm is a floating cage that can be tracked with a satellite. The fish keep moving, they're healthier, they're swimming more, and their waste is distributed over a wider space. So, it's not collecting and causing a pollution. It's able to be consumed by the environment. So, that's the kind of aquapreneur, I feel like he's like my idealized aquapreneur. We already do this thing, fish farming, but he's created a new innovation to make it better for the environment and healthier for the fish.
[00:14:45] I think also once we get some larger communities out on the high seas, middle of the Pacific, if you imagine a gas station in the middle of nowhere, there are ships going back and forth shipping goods across continents. So, if you had a seastead in the middle, you can have a lot of hospitality for those shippers. You can have refueling, you can have trade. That's what I'd like to see maybe 20 or 30 years from now.
[00:15:12] Jackson Steger: That's really cool, like a nice truck stop for these boats. Maybe even more of a touristy thing too. I would definitely want to visit. I have so many questions. This is awesome. I guess I'll call this like the legal category of questions. But first maybe it would be helpful to share with the audience what the Seasteading Institute does and how it advocates for seasteaders. But then my reason for asking that is also to just better understand how seasteading organizations achieve autonomy and are recognized as their own entity and aren't put in someone's eminent domain. I don't understand really anything about international waters. So, maybe you could just give an overview for the audience.
[00:15:53] Carly Jackson: Sure, and it's going to be a very basic overview because I have a basic understanding of it. So, every vessel should be flagged for your own safety, as well as to comply with international law. So basically, if your vessel is flagged, the way I understand it is there are rules of engagement for other vessels, right? So, essentially it's like registering your car with your state. So, you register your vessel with the country, and you have the flag of that country, and there are certain regulations tied to the flag, like who are the required crew members, what are their responsibilities, what are the inspections. So, like safety requirements on the vessel. And so, different flagging registries from different countries have slightly different regulations attached to the flag. We think the path forward for seasteaders is to flag with an existing nation and then you're legitimate in international law.
[00:16:49] And what we are working to do is to create a new kind of category for a seastead, because currently there's one requirement for a lot of vessels, that they have to come into port and be inspected and cleaned. Now, if you have a seastead, it's going to be extremely costly and time consuming to move that. Well, depending on how it's designed. But for most of them that we've looked at, it's going to be extremely time consuming and costly to bring that seastead into port. So, that's an example of a regulation that applies for current vessels, but probably would not be great for seasteads.
[00:17:21] And so, we're working on developing, and my boss, the president of the Seasteading Institute, Joe Quirk, has researched and talked with flagging registries, moving forward with a new kind of seastead flag category. That's what we're focused on now as far as opening the legal doors for seasteads on the high seas to be respected. The issue is if you have a vessel out there without a flag, basically any other vessel can board or disassemble your structure, and there's no legal remedy. So now there are courts, that you could have a legal remedy if you have a conflict with someone on the high seas.
[00:18:01] And at this point it's probably the most free situation because you can pick your court basically. There’s a market of different legal venues on the high seas, which is different than if you have a conflict on land. You're tied to the government at your location if you have a conflict on land. So, we think in that way it's probably the most free environment available to people right now on Earth.
[00:18:25] Jackson Steger: Who would be the entity that would grant this new category of seastead? Is it the U.N.? Is it some international ocean or water organization? Who are you appealing to?
[00:18:38] Carly Jackson: So, there are many different countries with many different flagging registries. So that's another benefit. We have a market to choose from. And so, we've talked to several different flagging registries. And we think that as soon as we get a flag with one, we expect our seasteads to be so successful and profitable that many different countries will be like, oh, we want to have them as part of our naval – well, I'm not sure what the term would be – our maritime representation basically. Like we expect there to be some competition of, oh, your seastead flag requires you to do X, Y, and Z and pay this much. We want to have that competition. So, that's sort of the core of seasteading, is having a competition, and we do have that among flagging registries. So, we're just working, we're figuring out how to get the first one done now, and we will probably be talking to multiple flagging registries about getting a seastead flag.
[00:19:31] Jackson Steger: Very cool. In the interim, as you're building out these different suites of registries that recognize a seastead flag, are there countries that you're recommending to like current seastead projects that you recommend flying under their flag in the meantime that have regulations that are more appealing to seasteading organizations right now and what are those?
[00:19:52] Carly Jackson: At the moment our most advanced seasteading project is Ocean Builders, and they are based in Panama. Panama has a very open flagging registry and is very open to foreign investment. So, we'd say Panama is probably a good choice. But really if someone wants to seastead, it so much depends on the specific design of the seastead. So, it's hard to say, like it depends on exactly do you have a structured design and that determines a lot about what flagging registry would be the most return on your investment. The other thing is if you have a connection in your country, that's probably a huge asset. So, if anyone out there is interested and curious about that, you can reach out. Or one of the things we do is we try to help people navigate and communicate with the government officials to allow for seasteading wherever they are.
[00:20:45] Jackson Steger: Super helpful. I want to dive into now this whole category of seastead design. And the first question is maybe more towards the safety side. How can seasteads protect themselves from piracy? And is that a problem that has happened before?
[00:21:04] Carly Jackson: So, pirates are usually in a very specific location and predictable location in the world. And so, the first rule of thumb is don't put your seastead where you know that there's a lot of pirate activity. We have a video on our website that's says ‘what about pirates?’ So, we’ve addressed it there. I also have a podcast interview with Dale Brown of the Threat Management in Detroit, and he talked about you form alliances with people. So, even if you're 200 miles from land, you still want to form an alliance and be on friendly terms with the country that has a coastguard that's going to be nearby, you know, peaceful trade, peaceful allies, that will protect you from invaders.
[00:21:55] There's a lot of, again, things that need to be tested. You can have a fish farm of nets, you can have AI, autonomous vehicles patrolling the water to alert you to anyone coming by. There are some things to consider. I mean, there's a long history of piracy. I'm sure we could study how pirates are defeated in the past and make sure that we have the right weapons. Again, you don't want to have weapons that are going to antagonize the nearest government because then they're not going to look at you sideways. Again, peaceful trade relationships, I think, are the strongest protection.
[00:22:29] Jackson Steger: Yeah, super fair. Before then getting into the rest of the design space, I have some follow-ups, because you used the word ‘threat’ and that made me think storms and all kinds of other…But what are the other threats that seasteaders ought to be aware of and that you help them plan for?
[00:22:46] Carly Jackson: So, hurricanes, there's a band around the equator where hurricanes do not go. And so, the first seasteads will be in that protected zone. Storms, we've designed vessels to deal with storms and waves. And so, learning from those designs is, what you do is you design to handle what you can expect. And there's a lot of data on like wave height and storms that you can follow. So, again, it's dependent on the location. So, find a proper location and make sure you design your structure to handle the kinds of waves and weather that location generally gets. There's plenty of space on the ocean that’s friendly that's not threat basically, where you don't have to deal with these many threats. So, we're starting there. We're starting in the easy spots.
[00:23:34] Jackson Steger: Cool.
[00:23:35] Carly Jackson: Now, we had a certification course a while ago, and I was able to attend it and get my scuba certification and do a sailing certification. And I think it's really important there because we learn basic safety, basic how to swim, how to alert someone, the worldwide known signs for distress, that's important. Just basic safety. Because I think probably the biggest threat to seasteaders is going to be drowning. And so, having those common-sense processes of know how to swim but also have safety vessels nearby, and don't overextend yourself, like just common sense, keep yourself safe.
[00:24:15] Jackson Steger: And wear sunscreen, if you look at all like me.
[00:24:17] Carly Jackson: And wear sunscreen.
[00:24:18] Jackson Steger: That's helpful. Thanks. Now, I want to go into design. So, when I imagine seasteading, before having done the Googling I did for the show, I was picturing like Settlers of Catan as different hexagonal structures paired together and laid out geometrically. But that could just be totally a wild guess and wrong. Is there a prototypical seasteading design either in the early science fiction that there is on this space or that the engineers and physicists you mentioned earlier have spoken to that…Could you just paint a picture of what maybe a successful seasteading enterprise might look like?
[00:24:59] Carly Jackson: So, Ocean Builders is working on pods. So, their designs are single-family homes that sit on top of this bar, and they went with that design because it is the most economical. They're selling them starting at $250,000. They have learned from past mistakes of other seasteaders. There was a project to have a cruise ship and rent out rooms on the cruise ship, but that turned out to be a much higher capital investment upfront, we weren't able to meet those fundraising goals. And it's the same for other large structures. So, it's a matter of what can we get done so that we can iterate and grow into the future.
[00:25:41] So, those single-family floating homes are the first step, and they will be located close to land, and they're going to prove the case that you can live on the ocean and acclimate people to living on the ocean. And then moving out farther, you can develop, I think the modular structure that you described, the hexagonal Catan, makes a lot of sense. One of the benefits is that if you don't like the community you're in, you can take your home and float it to another community. So, we want something to be modular.
[00:26:09] The other thing that's really cool is what if you need to reorganize your city? What if you decide that your fish farm being here is influencing the seaweed farm there and maybe just separate the modules and move them so that they're not interfering with each other? That's going to be really useful. So, the modular approach is, I think, probably going to be the most popular approach there. Also, the benefit of having a very large structure is that you decrease – if you have it large and spread out, you decrease the amount that waves can disrupt you. So, that's going to be appealing for some, but again, higher cost to begin. So, we need to prove the technology before people are going to invest enough money for us to be able to build those larger structures.
[00:26:56] Jackson Steger: Yeah, I really like this modular approach. It's exciting because in Cabin and, and this larger network state space, there is this idea that you could have a product city, I'm not sure if you've heard of this term before, but for example, if you have a bunch of fitness enthusiasts and you all wanted them to live in a world where there's pull-up bars everywhere and just great gym resources, you could build Fitopia, right? But that would never actually happen, I don't think, in that specific example in like on land because there's just so many other things you need. But in a modular sea environment, you could have the fitness enthusiasts all group their homes around maybe like a single pod that is dedicated to, like has a track and a basketball court, and I don’t know, dozen other cool fitness things. And you can apply that to any, like Balaji calls this One Commandment or moral innovations, any specific theme you could group how the pods around folks who like that theme. So, that's really cool.
[00:27:57] I want to tie this design piece into what you were saying earlier about OTEC and just try to best understand, what is the full tech stack of seasteading, and maybe Ocean Builders as the best example, but like maybe there are other entities that like all have the similar things. What are like the three to five core technologies that seasteaders must have in place in order to be successful?
[00:28:21] Carly Jackson: Okay. So, energy generation, waste management, growing food. I guess you could say transportation to and from. So, like having a boat. Energy, food, waste management. And I think, I don't think I can even get to five. I think those are the crucial things.
[00:28:37] Jackson Steger: Sure. Cool. Thanks for that. Maybe, again, Ocean Builders is the best example, but how many people are going to live in a typical seasteading project? How large of a community are we talking about? Maybe both now, but then also trying to get your understanding for how many people here could live in seasteading communities like 15 years from now?
[00:28:56] Carly Jackson: Yeah. I think, at first, we'll have small communities, maybe 20 to 30 families. Fifteen years from now, I'd love to see a hundred people living in a community. And then, ideally, we want like real full-size cities, 100,000 people, 200,000 people. A million people, I haven't really thought that through, but I think it's possible to eventually having a million-person floating city. There's a lot of space out there.
[00:29:25] Jackson Steger: Yeah, I can imagine. As we approach close, one sort of last question. On the Seasteading Institute's website, you write about the ‘8 Great Moral Imperatives’ of seasteading. Could you just share what those are for the audience, and maybe for each one, just like how seasteading helps to accelerate or fix the solutions to the particular problems that the imperatives include?
[00:29:55] Carly Jackson: Yes. Seasteading is a word that we made up. And I think it's so important that we include not just the goal and our desires for seasteading but also, with the definition of the word, a culture around seasteading. We want a specific culture. And that's what the ‘8 Great Moral Imperatives’ is about. I'm pulling it up, so I can make sure I don't miss one.
[00:30:18] Jackson Steger: Sure, take your time.
[00:30:19] Carly Jackson: Okay. So, the first one on our website is enrich the poor. So, opening up a space where people can innovate in technology and innovate in governance structures will create an environment where people can set their own tone for how they make a living and will have different methods available to make a living. In entrepreneurship, in particular, that's our first moral imperative, that we want an environment where people are free, and part of that is having clear and consistent rule of law.
[00:30:53] Now, we will not be telling seasteaders how to organize their communities. But again, as the culture of seasteading supports clear and consistent rule of law, because we've seen in the past when you bring rule of law into a space, development and enrichment, and that's part of what we want for our seasteading future.
[00:31:12] Cure the sick. I mentioned before, having freedom from certain regulations will allow for innovation in medical technology. I have a podcast interview with Dr. Mary Ruwart, and she talks a lot about that, about what sort of regulations have stifled innovation in the medical field. And so, we want to have seasteads where people are testing new pharmaceuticals, new treatments without being stuck in old regulatory structures.
[00:31:40] Feed the hungry. There's so much potential to grow fish stocks and grow seaweed, which can, even if humans aren't eating seaweed directly, putting that into our food supply will then just support the rest of our food supply. And when you're growing food on the ocean, you’re not using up fresh water. I think it's obvious once it's pointed out, but it took me a while to think about this. You don't need pesticides. You don't need to use fresh water. These are the things that are causing food insecurity and causing pollution on land with agriculture. And so, providing a new way to grow food without those externalities.
[00:32:18] Clean the atmosphere. The ocean is the Earth's lung. We've seen acidification of the ocean, which means the carbon dioxide in our air is being absorbed by the ocean. Having sustainable aquaculture and using OTEC and having people on the ocean actively working to improve the quality of the ocean, improve life, that then has an effect on the atmosphere as well.
[00:32:44] Restore the oceans. I think that I've already talked about that, about finding new ways to grow food that are environmentally restorative. Our goal is not sustainability, it's restoring the environment.
[00:32:56] And live in balance with nature. So, I look at the live in balance with nature on our website, and there's an image from one of our partners, Delta Sync, where they proposed a city that floats in a delta that cleans up anything that's being washed from the land, which most of that is excess fertilizer from agriculture gets washed through the rivers into the Delta, creates algae blooms, which are toxic and deadly for a lot of sea life. If you have a floating city there that is using those nutrients to grow food that we want and can use, then you're creating a balance, or rather correcting an imbalance, with human grown food and human grown problems, and trying to correct that balance by then collecting what are pollutants making them into useful nutrients.
[00:33:42] Power the world. Finding new ways to generate energy, so that we're not relying on fossil fuels on the ocean, we can use solar, wind energy, wave energy, and we talked a little bit about OTEC.
[00:33:56] And live in peace. So, the idea of having innovative governance, a marketplace where people can create new forms of governance and see what works, so ideally we won't have people fighting over limited resources. I feel a little naive saying that, but at least for the first few decades, there's so many resources out on the ocean, that having the freedom to just pick up your home and move will resolve a lot of conflict or avoid a lot of conflict. You won't be fighting over keeping what you've grown for yourself. It's yours and you can take it with you. And so, we think that will create a more peaceful way of being, and then having people who are out there who don't have allegiances to existing land-based governance but have an allegiance to finding their own, what works best for themselves, changes, a perception of what government is for. If you change the perception that government is to provide certain services to the citizens, then we expect a real shift in our culture.
[00:35:01] Just like we saw historically, when the United States was being settled, and you saw a democratic republic being a very successful and prosperous country, we saw those influence go back to the monarchies in Europe and changed the way that they organize their governance. So, we want to see another shift in the way people consider governance just like we have seen in the past.
[00:35:24] Jackson Steger: Awesome. A very comprehensive answer and a very comprehensive podcast. Thank you so much, Carly, for joining. I feel like I learned so much in such a short amount of time, which is rare and special. Where can listeners go to find more both about the podcast you host, Seasteading Today, but also seasteading more broadly? What's your call to action to the listeners?
[00:35:46] Carly Jackson: Visit our website at www.seasteading.org. So that's like homesteading, but on the ocean, www.seasteading.org. And if you go to our news, you'll find different categories for podcast, for videos. There's an FAQ. It's very comprehensive with links to videos. And you can subscribe to our email newsletter. And we have a lot of social media, which if you go to our homepage and scroll down, you'll find all of our social media, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Telegram. Discord, Odyssey. Whichever one works for you, you can find us on that social media channel. And engage with us. Ask us questions.
[00:36:30] And yeah, thank you so much for having me, and I hope we'll be able to connect in the future and grow both our communities.
[00:36:36] Jackson Steger: Yeah, I can't wait to see maybe some ocean-based neighborhoods as part of the Cabin Network City. Thanks again, Carly.
[00:36:44] Carly Jackson: Thanks.
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Jonathan Hillis
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