1st Meetup: Get lunch and talk about your interests in seasteading/mariculture

Hi, everyone. Depending on the interest from other people in the group, this event may happen on a different date or be moved, so please confirm before driving across the metro area (or further)!

Short version: let's meet and talk about interests, potential for future collaboration and so on.

Long version:

If you're a newbie, you'll probably want to read the seasteading book beforehand: https://www.seasteading.org/book/

If you don't want to read the book, here is a quick 3+ paragraph summary, somewhat editorialized by me:

After many decades of working in apparent isolation on individual aspects of what we now think of as seasteading, many researchers (especially the late Patrick Takahashi) started to realize that their ideas and projects were not just compatible, but instead highly synergistic with the work of others. Finally, people are starting to come together to build these technologies in real life.

So let's be specific: seasteading is the idea of colonizing the world's oceans and it sits at the intersection of several rapidly evolving areas, including:

• cheap and sustainable food production (aquaculture especially)
• innovations in political systems
• renewable energy (OTEC, in particular)
• environmental remediation
• new techniques in manufacturing (3d printing)
• robotics
  and
• naval engineering

It offers solutions to many of society's big problems and the many people who work on it have overlapping but often distinct reasons. Some want to make healthy food as cheap as possible for the poorest in the world. Others are concerned about environmental degradation brought about by conventional food and energy production (soil erosion, algal blooms, deforestation, diseases caused by air pollution, climate change). Some see entrenched corruption in our political systems and would like a frontier in which to create their own political systems that foster the social and technological innovations that improve people's lives.

Altogether though, these people want to make the world better through seasteading. An outline for the full, open-ocean (note, you don't have to start with everything on the open-ocean though) tech stack is as follows: use OTEC to harvest energy and "upwell" (push up) nutrients from the ocean floor. Distribute those nutrients to kelp farms near the surface, where the kelp can receive sunlight. Within the kelp farms, grow fish, oysters and so on (you can also eat the kelp). Use the energy from OTEC (and also wind, solar and biofuels) to power electrolysis for harvesting minerals/metals from seawater (or you can mine them from the ocean floor or import them if necessary). Also use the energy from OTEC, wind, solar and biofuels to desalinate water. Altogether this gives you energy, food, water and minerals. The final ingredient is of course, shelter, or rather sufficiently cheap, comfortable and safe structures for human habitation. Oil rigs already serve this purpose, but further improvements, especially out of Japan, Singapore and the Netherlands are in progress.

While all this may seem far-fetched, keep in mind that you don't have to go straight from nothing on the ocean to New York in the middle of the Atlantic (Blue York?). You can start with small, seasonal colonies for the most economically productive activities in the gentlest parts of the ocean (which in a way has already happened with oil rigs and also began with the first seastead off of Thailand) and build from there. As a comparison, consider the development of aerospace engineering. It took time to go from a barn in Kittyhawk, North Carolina (the Wright brothers) to NASA's, Spacex's and Boeing's current technology (manned trips to Mars and the Moon).