On “comfort”: There’s likely enough challenge in living on the water to keep it a frontier for a good long while. Even a “comfortable” life on the sea is going to be challenging in all sorts of useful ways. Here’s another analogy: motorcycling. Driving to work in a car is too easy to be inherently satisfying. It quickly becomes routine, automatic, something you can do without really thinking about it. You can turn up the stereo and mentally drift away.

Now suppose we trade in that car for a motorcycle. Modern motorcycles are as practical, comfortable, and as full of modern human conveniences as manufacturers can make them. Yet under it all, it’s still a motorcycle. No matter how comfortable that seat is, no matter how reliable those brakes are, you just can’t get away from the fact that at any moment if you let your concentration slip you are likely to be killed or maimed. The prospect of imminent death concentrates the mind; motorcyclists tend to drive more carefully, more creatively, and live more in the moment as they travel than do car drivers.

If and when Ephemerisle becomes “comfortable” it’ll still involve some risk, and that’s kind of the point. If it starts to seem too tame, you could move it to deeper, bumpier waters or experiment with cheaper, flimsier floating structures. No matter what, the difficulty of getting there and surviving there is going to be a big part of the experience – the framing – much as the difficulty of getting to the desert and surviving there is part of the BurningMan experience. (if they held BurningMan at the Santa Clara County Fairgrounds, would it mean as much?)

Even if they do resemble a minivan more than a motorycle, Seasteads will inevitably involve some degree of risk and privation too. But if we ever reach a point where there really is *no* extra challenge to seastead life, that’ll be a good time for the risk-loving frontiersmen to start working on spacesteads!

The frontier is, above all, an opportunity to reboot. To cast aside the accumulated cruft – scrape all those barnacles off the hull – and start over fresh. We might choose to keep some of the old rules – or the rules about rules – out of a sense of tradition or nostalgia, but many will end up getting tossed overboard. We’ll be able to ask “do we really need this?” and come up with a better local optimum in many dimensions.

I’m pretty hopeful about the whole project. This could work!

http://globalswadeshi.ning.com/forum/topics/2097821:Topic:4261

Next year at Ephemerisle – a hexayurt with a working Saltwater Greenhouse?

Mark Frazier
Openworld.com
@openworld