Floating cities, no longer science fiction, begin to take shape

A rendering of the Floating Island Project in French Polynesia.

Blue Frontiers will build and operate the islands, with the goal of building about a dozen by 2020, including homes, hotels, offices and restaurants, at a cost of about $60 million.

CreditBlue Frontier

From New York Times by David Gelles

It is an idea at once audacious and simplistic, a seeming impossibility that is now technologically within reach: cities floating in international waters — independent, self-sustaining nation-states at sea.

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.

 Seasteading is accelerating.

News reports can't keep up and frankly don't have a clue.

Want the real story?

Want to know who, why, and how?

Meet some of the leading seasteaders making it happen.

It's even more exciting than you think.

Joe Quirk is solely responsible for this video's content, especially the crazy stuff at the end.

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.

That has not always been easy.
At times, the story of the seasteading movement seems to lapse into self parody.
Burning Man gatherings in the Nevada desert are an inspiration, while references to the Kevin Costner film “Waterworld” are inevitable.
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.

And yet in 2017, with sea levels rising because of climate change and established political orders around the world teetering under the strains of populism, seasteading can seem not just practical, but downright appealing.



A fully autonomous floating city was once just a libertarian fantasy,

but is now just a few years shy of becoming reality.

Earlier this year, the government of French Polynesia agreed to let the Seasteading Institute begin testing in its waters.
Construction could begin soon, and the first floating buildings — the nucleus of a city — might be inhabitable in just a few years.

“If you could have a floating city, it would essentially be a start-up country,” said Joe Quirk, president of the Seasteading Institute.
“We can create a huge diversity of governments for a huge diversity of people.”

The term seasteading has been around since at least 1981, when the avid sailor Ken Neumeyer wrote a book, “Sailing the Farm,” that discussed living sustainably aboard a sailboat.
Two decades later, the idea attracted the attention of Patri Friedman, the grandson of the economist Milton Friedman, who seized on the notion.

Mr. Friedman, a freethinker who had founded “intentional communities” while in college, was living in Silicon Valley at the time and was inspired to think big.
So in 2008 he quit his job at Google and co-founded the Seasteading Institute with seed funding from Peter Thiel, the libertarian billionaire.
In a 2009 essay, Mr. Thiel described seasteading as a long shot, but one worth taking.
“Between cyberspace and outer space lies the possibility of settling the oceans,” he wrote.

The investment from Mr. Thiel generated a flurry of media attention, but for several years after its founding, the Seasteading Institute did not amount to much.
A prototype planned for San Francisco Bay in 2010 never materialized, and seasteading became a punch line to jokes about the techno-utopian fantasies gone awry, even becoming a plotline in the HBO series “Silicon Valley.”

But over the years, the core idea behind seasteading — that a floating city in international waters might give people a chance to redesign society and government — steadily attracted more adherents.
In 2011, Mr. Quirk, an author, was at Burning Man when he first heard about seasteading.
He was intrigued by the idea and spent the next year learning about the concept.

Based on designs by DeltaSync, a Dutch engineering firm specializing on floating urbanization, this video by Roark3D at Fort Galt illuminates our plan for the Floating City Project, the first floating city with significant political autonomy.

For Mr. Quirk, Burning Man, where innovators gather, was not just his introduction to seasteading.
It was a model for the kind of society that seasteading might enable.
“Anyone who goes to Burning Man multiple times become fascinated by the way that rules don’t observe their usual parameters,” he said.

The next year, he was back at Burning Man speaking about seasteading in a geodesic dome.
Soon after that, he became involved with the Seasteading Institute, took over as president and, with Mr. Friedman, wrote “Seasteading: How Floating Nations Will Restore The Environment, Enrich The Poor, Cure The Sick and Liberate Humanity From Politicians.”

Seasteading is more than a fanciful hobby to Mr. Quirk and others involved in the effort.
It is, in their minds, an opportunity to rewrite the rules that govern society.
“Governments just don’t get better,” Mr. Quirk said.
“They’re stuck in previous centuries.
That’s because land incentivizes a violent monopoly to control it.”

No land, no more conflict, the thinking goes.

Even if the Seasteading Institute is able to start a handful of sustainable structures, there’s no guarantee that a utopian community will flourish.
People fight about much more than land, of course, and pirates have emerged as a menace in certain regions.
And though maritime law suggests that seasteading may have a sound legal basis, it is impossible to know how real governments might respond to new neighbors floating offshore.

Mr. Quirk and his team are focusing on their Floating Island Project in French Polynesia.
The government is creating what is effectively a special economic zone for the Seasteading Institute to experiment in and has offered 100 acres of beachfront where the group can operate.

Mr. Quirk and his collaborators created a new company, Blue Frontiers, which will build and operate the floating islands in French Polynesia.
The goal is to build about a dozen structures by 2020, including homes, hotels, offices and restaurants, at a cost of about $60 million.
To fund the construction, the team is working on an initial coin offering.
If all goes as planned, the structures will feature living roofs, use local wood, bamboo and coconut fiber, and recycled metal and plastic.

“I want to see floating cities by 2050, thousands of them hopefully, each of them offering different ways of governance,” Mr. Quirk said.
“The more people moving among them, the more choices we’ll have and the more likely it is we can have peace, prosperity and innovation.”

Links :

• The Independant : World's first floating city to be built off the coast of French Polynesia by 2020
• DailyMail : Billionaire Barry Diller revives ambitious plans for $250m floating island park in New York City after he spiked it due to rising costs and legal challenges
• NYTimes : As Climate Change Accelerates, Floating Cities Look Like Less of a Pipe Dream
• The Guardian : Seasteading: tech leaders' plans for floating city trouble French Polynesians
• Reason : 20,000 Nations Above the Sea (2009)
• GeoGarage blog : Has the time come for floating cities? / Freedom Ship concept : How floating cities ... / Ocean living: A step closer to reality? / This floating platform could filter the ... / ‘I rule my own ocean micronation’ /As seas rise, future floats / Artificial island could be solution for ... / A floating artificial reef would let you ... / 

Seafarer mental health

It is estimated that 90% of global trade is carried by ship, but little is known about the lives of the thousands of people who work in shipping and at sea.
Now new research suggests that the rate of suicide is increasing among seafarers.
This film shows the pressures faced by people working at sea, an industry that employs more than 1.5 million people globally.
If you, or someone you know, have been affected by issues in this film, the following organisations may be able to help.

From Maritime Executive 

The BBC has produced a film that looks at the pressures faced by people working at sea, expressed through the eyes of an Ethiopian seafarer.

In the storyline, Amaha Senu left his home in Ethiopia to become a merchant seafarer, attracted by the financial opportunities.

Soon he began to regret his decision and considered taking his own life.

Suicide rates among seafarers have more than tripled since 2014 and are now the most common cause of death at sea, according to figures from the UK P&I Club.

Crew deaths attributed to suicide have increased from 4.4 percent in 2014-2015 to 15.3 percent in 2015-2016.

Between 2001 and 2005, merchant seafarers scored the second highest level of suicides amongst all professions, after coal miners, according to research published by Swansea University in 2013. Today, the rate of suicide for international seafarers is triple that of shore workers, according to the IMO.

ISWAN offers immediate response to seafarer calls via its 24-hour multilingual helpline, SeafarerHelp, which has recently been made available on mobile messaging service WhatsApp.

A publication Managing Traumatic Stress – Guidance for Maritime Organisations is available online to provide top-level guidance to senior management to help improve the mental health of seafarers.

It offers education and evidence-based approaches specifically designed for the maritime industry.

The guidance is authored by Professor Neil Greenberg, Managing Director of March on Stress and Professor of Defence Mental Health at King’s College London and published by The Nautical Institute in partnership with the charity Human Rights at Sea.

2017 hurricanes and aerosols simulation



Amazing to see how the sand and the smoke are disseminated

on several thousands of kilometers by the hurricanes.

From NASA by Yvette Smith

How can you see the atmosphere?
By tracking what is carried on the wind.

The answer is blowing in the wind. Tiny particles, known as aerosols, are carried by winds around the globe.
This visualization uses data from NASA satellites combined with our knowledge of physics and meteorology to track three aerosols: dust, smoke, and sea salt.
Sea salt, shown here in blue, is picked up by winds passing over the ocean.
As tropical storms and hurricanes form, the salt particles are concentrated into the spiraling shape we all recognize.
With their movements, we can follow the formation of Hurricane Irma and see the dust from the Sahara, shown in tan, get washed out of the storm center by the rain.

This visualization uses data from NASA satellites, combined with mathematical models in a computer simulation allow scientists to study the physical processes in our atmosphere.
Advances in computing speed allow scientists to include more details of these physical processes in their simulations of how the aerosols interact with the storm systems.
The increased resolution of the computer simulation is apparent in fine details like the hurricane bands spiraling counter-clockwise.
Computer simulations let us see how different processes fit together and evolve as a system.
By using mathematical models to represent nature we can separate the system into component parts and better understand the underlying physics of each.
Today's research improves next year's weather forecasting ability.

Hurricane Ophelia was very unusual.
It headed northeast, pulling in Saharan dust and smoke from wildfires in Portugal, carrying both to Ireland and the UK.
This aerosol interaction was very different from other storms of the season.
As computing speed continues to increase, scientists will be able to bring more scientific details into the simulations, giving us a deeper understanding of our home planet.

Tiny aerosol particles such as smoke, dust, and sea salt are transported across the globe, making visible weather patterns and other normally invisible physical processes.

By following the sea salt that is evaporated from the ocean, you can see the storms of the 2017 hurricane season.
During the same time, large fires in the Pacific Northwest released smoke into the atmosphere.
Large weather patterns can transport these particles long distances: in early September, you can see a line of smoke from Oregon and Washington, down the Great Plains, through the South, and across the Atlantic to England.
Dust from the Sahara is also caught in storms sytems and moved from Africa to the Americas.
Unlike the sea salt, however, the dust is removed from the center of the storm.
The dust particles are absorbed by cloud droplets and then washed out as it rains.
Advances in computing speed allow scientists to include more details of these physical processes in their simulations of how the aerosols interact with the storm systems.

Since the fall of 1997, NASA satellites have continuously observed all plant life at the surface of the land and ocean.
This view of life from space is furthering knowledge of our home planet, and how it's changing.
In the Northern Hemisphere, ecosystems wake in the spring, taking in carbon dioxide and exhaling oxygen as they sprout leaves – and a fleet of Earth-observing satellites track the spread of vegetation.
Meanwhile, in the ocean, microscopic plants drift through sunlit surface waters blooming into billions of carbon-dioxide-absorbing, oxygen-producing organisms – and satellites map the swirls of their color.
Life.
It's the one thing that, so far, makes Earth unique among the thousands of other planets we’ve discovered.

Can an autonomous sailboat cross the Atlantic ?

Sailing a boat across the Atlantic is challenging enough for a human sailor.

But what about a computer?

BBC Future visits a sailing regatta for robots.

From BBC by Nathan Hurst

No one has ever sailed an autonomous boat across the Atlantic.
Few have even tried – just a handful of teams have competed in the transatlantic Microtransat Challenge since it began in 2010.
All have failed, for reasons including “caught in a fishing net”, “picked up by a fishing boat” or, frequently, simply lost at sea with a vague last-known location.

The closest anyone has ever come was the summer of 2017, when a boat called Sailbuoy, built by a company called Offshore Sensing, travelled 1,500 kilometers – more than half way – before it started going in circles.

Officially, the winner of the Microtransat is the fastest team to achieve the crossing; in reality, the winner is the first.
They have set rules, like a maximum vessel length (2.4m or 8ft) and an obstacle/collision avoidance system.
But teams can just launch their boat anytime between July and December, and it doesn’t even matter what direction they go – Newfoundland to Ireland, or vice versa.
Competitors include university clubs, but also autonomous vessel companies like Offshore Sensing (a company that makes sail-powered autonomous research vessels), and even the US Naval Academy.
The main goal is just finishing, after all.

The boats had to compete in the same kind of events that would test human sailors

(Credit: Aland Sailing Robots)

“It’s just a really challenging environment,” says David Peddie, CEO of Offshore Sensing.
“You have to cope with anything the ocean can throw at you.”

Sailbuoy has a bit of an advantage.
It’s a commercial company that sells similar boats for applications in oceanography and meteorology research.
The vessel it sent on the Microtransat had previously completed several months of autonomous sailing in the rougher North Sea without any problems.

From the top, the boat looks a little like a surfboard, with a solar panel in the middle, and a short, trapezoidal sail near the front.
Aside from the sail, it sits low in the water, cutting through with a tapered nose and tail.
Rough seas toss it about, even washing over the top, without damaging it, and it seems, almost miraculously, to keep a steady course.

Others have eyes on the challenge, too, and new ideas on how to solve it.
At the Aland University of Applied Sciences, a small team of engineers has been building robotic sailboats and entering them in competitions since 2013.
This year, they bought a 2.8m (9.2ft) rigid “wing” type sail – the kind of symmetric airfoil you might see on World Cup sailboats – from a Swedish aircraft manufacturer and mounted it on their 2.4m (8ft) sailboat, ASPire.

 The calm waters of a Norwegian fjord are very different to the rough seas of the open Atlantic

Horten in the GeoGarage platform (NHS chart)

ASP stands for Autonomous Sailing Platform, and it’s white like Sailbuoy, but with a deeper, narrower hull and the tall, rectangular wing sail, flanked with two smaller airfoils.
Both rigs were built not to compete in a race, but to act as research tools, carrying water sensors to measure pH, temperature, conductivity, and salinity.
Despite the focus on research, the risks of using the new and unproven wing sail, and an untested system, Aland Sailing Robots entered its vessel in September’s World Robotic Sailing Championships, held in Horten, Norway – and won.

The World Robotic Sailing Championships is a spin-off of the Microtransat in which teams from universities or companies in related fields compete over four days in different tasks, including a fleet race, an area-scanning competition, collision avoidance, and station keeping, where the boat must hold its position for five minutes.

On a windy first day along Norway’s Oslofjord inlet, a staggered-start race saw ASPire launch shortly after a boat from Norway.
As the boats headed out into Horten’s inner harbour, a bay next to a shipyard with Sweden visible across the water, the team from Aland watched their boat slowly catch, then pass the leading boat.

Some of the robot boats will eventually try to cross the Atlantic under their own power

(Credit: Aland Sailing Robots)

“That was good to see,” says Anna Friebe, project manager for Aland Sailing Robots.
“I didn’t really think we would be able to compete.
But it ended up working, just in time.”

While the team’s strength is in software engineering and situational analysis, they still have to be adept enough at mechanical engineering to make the boat operate in the challenging seas.
ASPire was built on a hull with stabilising lead weights in the keel that was used in a paralympic sailing competition.
To this, in addition to the wing sail, the team mounted the research sensors and built a rig to winch those down into the water.

ASPire sailing at World Robotic Sailing Championships in September 2017

The boats at the World Robotic Sailing Championships vary in size and shape, from the futuristic-looking ASPire to a small, traditional two-sailed sloop that looks like the kind of remote-control sailboat a kid might sail on a pond.
On the second day of the competition, the fjord was shrouded in rain as the boats used the wind, the angle of their sails, and their rudders, to sit precisely in position without moving.
Like all the competitions, an onboard computer, programmed ahead of time, had to be capable of recognising the wind conditions, understanding its own location, and manipulating the sail and rudder to compensate.
This too, Aland won, ahead of second-place hosts University College of Southeast Norway and US Naval Academy in third place.

Day three featured area scanning, where boats had 30 minutes to cover as much of a designated area as possible.
Most used a traditional tacking manoeuvre to trace a path, playing out line to open the sail, or reeling it in to change the angle.
ASPire’s wing sail instead rotated around a central mast, which Friebe says simplified the operations.
Seen from overhead, ASPire’s path looks like a lawn-mower grid, compared to other boat’s piles of spaghetti, and so Aland made a full sweep, as day four’s collision avoidance event was cancelled due to a lack of sufficient wind.

Aland Sailing Robots was formed to compete in the Microtransat, but financial pressure – most of their funding comes from the European Regional Development Fund and goes toward the marine research platform – means they haven’t had the resources to make an attempt at the crossing.
The fun of competition and the long-term quest to cross the Atlantic are, for many of the participants, byproducts of business or research projects.

The aim of the Microtransat, according to organiser Colin Sauze, is to contribute to ocean-monitoring platforms, but also to provide a learning opportunity.

Both Aland and Offshore Sensing are focusing primarily on aquatic research.
Robots offer several big advantages over the other means of acquiring ocean data, says Peddie.
The other options – a drifting buoy, or a manned vessel – are less mobile or more expensive.
A traditional research vessel can cost $20,000 (£15,180) per day, which Peddie says could run an autonomous sailboat for several months, including the cost of the boat.
Furthermore, small boats (Sailbuoy is two metres long and weighs 60kg (200lbs)) can go places manned boats can’t, like the path of a hurricane, or volcanic or iceberg fields.

Many of the other teams, both in the Microtransat and the World Robotic Sailing Championships, are either run by industry, or partnered with industry.
The US Naval Academy team uses it as education for naval personnel (their boat, Trawler Bait, has been caught by fishermen more than once).
Half of the Chinese team is from Shanghai University, and the other half is from a company.
The Norwegian naval research institute sent an autonomous boat to help with the event.

And a lot of what they work on can be applied even beyond sailing vessels.
Autonomous shipping is already burgeoning, and the standards Microtransat competitors must meet for collision avoidance are the same ones put out by the International Maritime Organisation, and the automatic identification system that the Aland team used to transmit and receive course and speed to other vessels is the same one that commercial ships use.



Sailbuoy

“For us, as a company, it wasn’t a really big deal, the actual Microtransat,” says Peddie.
“But I’ve been following these guys for a number of years, and I think it’s an interesting concept.
It’s also something which has historic significance, like Lindbergh flew over basically the same distance connecting America to Europe.”

Still, Peddie plans to try again next year, once the Sailbuoy, which was picked up by a fishing vessel, is returned and fixed (they still don’t know quite what’s wrong with it).
“We’d just like to be the first ones who do it, and manage to cross this part of the ocean,” he says.
“Next year I expect we’ll manage the full 3,000 miles.”

Links :

• GeoGarage blog : Foiling sailing boats / The drone that will sail itself around the ... / Saildrone : a wind-propelled autonomous platform is ... / The Internet of everything sets sail / 
• Sailbot, International Robotic Sailing Competition

NOAA releases final National Charting Plan

From NOAA

NOAA’s Office of Coast Survey released the National Charting Plan following a public comment period that ended in July 2017.

A draft version of the plan was released in February 2017.

The final version reflects the feedback received from professional mariners, recreational boaters, print-on-demand chart publishers, third-party data providers, software developers, and other users of NOAA charts.

The National Charting Plan is a strategy to improve NOAA nautical chart coverage, products, and distribution.
It describes the evolving state of marine navigation and nautical chart production, and outlines actions that will provide the customer with a suite of products that are more useful, up-to-date, and safer to navigate with.
It is not a plan for the maintenance of individual charts, but a strategy to improve all charts.
Much of the content of the original draft remains unchanged, but several topics were added or clarified.
These include the following:

• Provides a more nuanced discussion of future production of raster and paper nautical charts. NOAA has no current plans to stop the production of paper or raster nautical charts. However, raster charts may look a bit different in the future.
• Includes an acknowledgement of the role played by third-party providers of information based on NOAA raster chart products.
• Includes an acknowledgement of the growing amount of source data that is coming from non-traditional or “crowd-source” data providers.
• Coast survey received fewer than twenty comments regarding the possible conversion of depths from fathoms and feet to meters. These came from both recreational boaters and professional mariners. The majority of the comments favored retaining the standard U.S. units of fathoms and feet.
• Coast survey is proceeding to make ENCs more compatible with metric units (The international product specification for ENC mandates that depths must be encoded in meters). However, raster charts will continue to show depths in fathoms and feet.
• Coast Survey is prototyping some options that would allow users to create customized raster charts by selecting the chart size and scale, as well as the units used to display depths.
• In partnership with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Coast Survey will continue to explore ways to improve the consistent, up-to-date provision of depth information in channels maintained by the Corps. This will likely change the way channel depths are portrayed on charts.
• Includes a section describing Coast Survey’s support to the U.S. Baseline Committee and the charting of important maritime boundaries.

You may ask a question or report a problem with any of Coast Survey’s products or services through the NOAA Nautical Inquiry and Comment System.