In January 2021, there were 100,000 vessels in the world fleet. America and Africa have a combined share of 24% of those vessels:

In January 2021, the world fleet reached a carrying capacity of 2.1 billion dwt, 63 million dwt more than the previous year. Over recent years, tonnage has increased considerably in all segments except general cargo carriers. Bulk carriers recorded an especially rapid increase. Between 2011 and 2021, their share in total carrying capacity rose from 39 to 43 per cent, whereas the share of oil tankers shrank from 31 to 29 per cent, and the share of general cargo from 6 to 4 per cent.

I find it curious that while the logistics of international transport is one of the lynchpins of the global economy, the distribution of vessels and consequently the shipping fees are not evenly distributed. Looking further into this subject, there are a few nuances, but it’s undeniable that for an environment that covers 70% of our planet, we have yet to scale up the marine industry to complement the ecological demand of ocean life, or the economic demand of landbound human life. This is a brief introduction to some of the facets and nuances of the marine industry, and how the coordinative platforms of web3 can be harnessed to complement the trajectory of the global economy.

Right now the biggest vessel by length was an oil tanker, with the largest deadweight tonnage (657,019 tonnes) recorded yet. This vessel is so large that it was taken out of operation primarily because it was impossible to pass through any canal, and there was basically no port that that could service her. Tankers are not just unwieldy and prone to catastrophic outcomes when they get into accidents, they’re some of the most expensive vessels.

The largest vessel by gross tonnage, in operation today, is a catamaran crane vessel that is used for installing and removing large oil platforms and pipelines. The largest cruise ship is the Oasis-class, with a displacement of 100,000 tonnes, and can support a maximum of almost seven thousand passengers.

Consider the volume of human activity that goes through a vessel of this class, and consider what it would be able to support without focusing on leisure or luxury features. But also consider that it costs $1.35 billion to build.

The largest class of container ships is the Triple E class, capable of carrying 18,000 TEUs (or twenty-foot containers). For reference, each container is expected to carry up to 60,000 lbs. When used as modular data centers, there a significant, flexible capacity to install computational resources in more places with low requirements for assembly, disassembly & transportation elsewhere.

Offshore platforms have been taken for granted in many ways. The last time any offshore platform has made the news has involved some disaster like Deepwater Horizon or some freakish ocean fire.

However, offshore platforms are a huge engineering feat. For example, the Petronius platform is one of the largest freestanding structures in the world, assuming one considers the submerged section part of that equation. On the other hand, the Olympus (Mars B) oil platform stands 406 feet tall and has a combined deck area of 342,000 square feet. There’s also a class of offshore platform that is typically unmanned, however their design and function revolves around oil drilling still. Forget the fact that these platforms only seem to exist for the sake of extracting petroleum, but consider our potential to build such platforms for sustainable economics (even with the challenges of making them resilient). To reiterate, these vessels are not appropriate projects for proof of concept, rather they are examples of our engineering limitations and allow for more intensive marine experiments.

Ports, the facilities that are needed to interface with these vessels, have a whole list of problems. The biggest one that is that there is no port that can interface with the largest hypothetical vessel (~500,000 DWT) that can be practically feasible. Right now the busiest port is the Port of Shanghai, so large that it is classified as a port-city. At the same time, there are projects that intend to create massive floating structures to extend the economic benefit of port-cities. If anything should be taken away from this, it’s that the money gained from international shipping wants to spend it on scaling up international shipping.

The other is the nation-state in which these ports reside; in many cases the shipbuilders and owners of ships will register them in a separate country with more permissive laws. I don’t necessarily see this practice as set of loopholes, the point is that an industry this expansive can’t seem to depend on the local politics of the corporations that can afford to build up, operate, & maintain vessels and ports. At the end of the day, we would have to consider the same countries that provide the same convenience, and any aspiration to rewrite preexisting entrenchment as an unnecessarily costly choice.

In terms of web3, we should be considering what it would take to build an international port, and in which ways we can affect the marine industry to further scale up without sacrificing the global ecology. Furthermore, as humans become more capable of constructing megastructures, we should be considering the end state. Will Earth’s oceans be covered in various stationary and mobile manmade constructs? Or will there be a better land or air-based logistical infrastructure to prevent such ecological impact?

Firstly, ships are great for fishing. Obviously, we don’t need web3 for commercial fishing, many fleets already have a well-polished, hyperoptimized system for that. This is limited by the ethical constraints of overfishing, so in many ways we have to consider what web3 can do as regenerative platform for preexisting fleets.

In my previous article about the degenerate playbook for fixating carbon, I proposed that fertilizing regions of the ocean would allow for farming certain species of fish.

https://mirror.xyz/m-j-r.eth/HlrUKtiFl7_LMDDIuJOrM_De0r7gNwn8jESlkm_7mzc

I believe that not only can web3 be used to coordinate a mass coordinated effort to scale up carbon fixation to keep pace with human industry, we also have the capacity and responsibility to deal with the cascading effects of our intervention in a way that is self-sustaining. There’s also an opportunity to find out the best opensource methodology for harvesting this sort of explosive biomass and storing it within a closed system like a supermassive container ship. This directly leads to a distributed web3 network of aquaponics, hydroponic farming, biofuel generation etc.

Another fixation tech that we should be testing in the context of scalable seasteading is recycling sewage through aquaponics. One of the biggest wastes that human civilization hasn’t really tackled at scale is phosphate depletion. This is a research field already, but one worth exploring in a closed environment that doesn’t depend on a preexisting supplier.

The other global issue is the scarcity of freshwater. Normally, we are accustomed to finding freshwater where it exists naturally, and there’s plenty of news about limiting our intake to help it recirculate. However, there are clear examples where bodies of water are not replenished at the same rate:

In order to actually produce freshwater, not just for personal consumption but also for pretty much every category of power generation, we need to run fuel-based desalination plants. Otherwise, desalination can be done in relatively smaller scale by utilizing solar stills. Logically, the most efficient way to scale up solar desalination is to build where the sun meets the water. Wouldn’t it make sense to take some of the largest vessels we can produce and experimentally determine how much surplus freshwater they can generate for on-land irrigation? When I see supermassive passenger ship like the Wonder of the Seas, instead of covering the top with luxury restaurants and manicured footpaths, why not cover it with a combination of solar stills, greenhouses, and renewable energy components?

These aspirations are not just for the sake of curiosity. Shipping is a massive source of carbon emissions, and optimizing the global fleet to meet decarbonization goals is no small feat. Moreover, this framework of stackable regenomics is leveraging ecological vacancy. We’re not going to invent some futuristic tech on land that somehow replaces trees, or 100x our freshwater supply. In most of those hypothetical cases, there is some excessive cost to actually implementing those changes, well beyond the comfort zone of the institutions and people that would have to procure the funds, materials, and labor. But there’s no question that, for humanity to progress to a Type-I civilization, we do need to empirically demonstrate closed marine structures that can support many crew and multiple industrial needs without damaging the environment in the process. Then, as a distributed public invested in sustainable marine regenomics, we can scale more extensively than any international corporation.

There are three utopian attempts at artificial micronations: the Republic of Minerva, the Republic of Rose Island, and the most recognizable, the Principality of Sealand. There are two utopian attempts at using cruise ships in a similar capacity: the MS Satoshi and the Freedom Ship (for reference, the latest estimated cost was $10 billion as of 2012). All of these projects required costly maintenance, and all of them were unsanctioned by most if not all governments. So why be optimistic that they can and should be explored further?

You might have heard about maritime law. Long story short, the ocean isn’t exactly a free-for-all, Wild West sort of deal, in fact it is mostly governed by a United Nations construct. However, this begs the question: what if multilateral treaties were autonomous, instead of relying on the process of forming and maintaining the fidelity of multinational governments or private international law? There seems to be two focal challenges to expanding human marine economy: engineering against the destructive nature of the environment, and governing many entities without a direct means of enforcement such as a generalized code of law. Web3 governance can be simply stated as: if things go wrong, the affected parties don’t get paid. When it comes to maritime economy and law, sometimes the bottleneck of requiring financial resources to do anything more should be more leveraged by the appropriate, neutral government.

Up until this point, I haven’t even mentioned major international resources like submarine communications cables.

If the web3 economy were to be extended to the marine industries, there’s quite a few improvements that we bring just by effortlessly enforcing universal standards of rights and industrial coordination. We can do more to answer for the unsustainable demand of human civilization without depending on land-based austerity. This can happen with less susceptibility to nation-state or corporate interests. If we can address one challenge, this leaves us with more potential to address the engineering challenges instead.

After ConstitutionDAO, I really thought about the maximum “flashmob” capacity that DeFi had at the time. Raising $40 million from the public for a historical artifact is one thing, but raising capital on the order of several hundred million or billions to deploy web3 city-vessels or floating port-cities is not as possible, not without private funding. But there’s definitely a playbook here.

https://creators.mirror.xyz/5YUK1Ef3BEMA9QEZvbOIh7ukbjAYL_0cs_NLplqgHw4

As anyone with a boat can tell you, these things are expensive to maintain. In many ways, this article describes a moonshot of epic proportions because the ocean is a hostile environment of epic proportions. Actually covering the ocean in permanent seasteads and establishing completely new routes would take trillions of dollars just by the fact that most of these areas and routes are already avoided because they are uneconomical. The silver lining is that we won’t be completing this for many decades.

There’s no guarantee that humans can build anything on the ocean without irreversibly changing the ecology of the ocean. Much like how we’ve altered our landscape, so too would we alter our seascapes. The lunarpunk side of the coin would state that by examining the evidence, one should conclude that the many free actors will pursue economic gain at any cost anyway. There’s plenty of examples of marine vessels operating within such an ethos. So, this is a risk we need to keep considering as we develop, but it will always be alongside unaligned interests that can afford to externalize the costs.

The other limitation is how we recycle waste. For example, water desalination produces brine as a waste product. How would we dispose of that? How would it be stored? How else can it be used? For any extraordinary modification we make to the environment, there’s probably a hidden cost to the methodology of doing such things without impact, while keeping in mind that it is being done en situ, in the harshest environments on Earth. And there’s no guarantee that we scale any better than nature can.

Additionally, all historical precedents have been met with direct hostility. In the cases that such a project existed directly offshore of a country, the countries have redefined the borders of their territorial waters. Unfortunately, ocean-going vessels answer to their FOC. Even in international waters, all vessels still have to comply with military force. There are ways to use web3 to automatically liquidate policies in the event of disruption, but this is mostly an unexplored area, and saying there would be resistance is probably an understatement.

Ultimately, this “experiment” has to be done atomically and under the present legal constraints. In that context, I will be focusing in future pieces on the small-scale specifications and possible DAO “circuits” that generate some measurable public good, and thusly could be autonomously compensated by web3 tokenomics. This “circuit” framework, in my humble opinion, can be used to distill megastructures and gigastructures into the components we can build today (referenced in my “Coordinated Expanse” post)

https://mirror.xyz/m-j-r.eth/U2HqTjkyxIlrFnkcxc35_NCX75QXTuCXFX_TI5FQUl4

At the end of the day, we either allow for these industries to scale in their current form and suffer from the measures of austerity that would be mandated anyway by conservationist backlash. Or, we choose to take our solarpunk ethos, the coordination of web3, and the initiative to optimize the global economy, and actually construct this distributed public good.