- Hot
- New
- Categories...
- Producer's Lounge
- Producer's Vault
- The Gulch: Live! (New)
- Ask the Gulch!
- Going Galt
- Books
- Business
- Classifieds
- Culture
- Economics
- Education
- Entertainment
- Government
- History
- Humor
- Legislation
- Movies
- News
- Philosophy
- Pics
- Politics
- Science
- Technology
- Video
- The Gulch: Best of
- The Gulch: Bugs
- The Gulch: Feature Requests
- The Gulch: Featured Producers
- The Gulch: General
- The Gulch: Introductions
- The Gulch: Local
- The Gulch: Promotions
- Marketplace
- Members
- Store
- More...
For a Gulch to thrive, IMHO, it should remote enough to make it hard for major powers to influence but not so remote as to make trade difficult. I imagine the Gulches feeling like the world gov'ts fail to respect their IP and the gov'ts feeling like the Gulches take their best and brightest without doing anything to deal with the world's criminals, lazy people, disabled people, etc.
I don't know if there is such a sweet spot that allows trade but makes it impractical for powerful institutions/gov'ts to exert influence.
I would definitely go on vacation to a Seasted. I have not contributed to these projects with money or free work, but I think I will contribute in some form at some point.
The way fish, whales, dolphins etc deal with hurricanes is to submerge.
When the wave is in water deeper than the wave's amplitude, the water can transmit the full force of the wave through the water. The problems begin when the wave hits "shoal" depth, ie the amplitude of the wave. Because in any wave front energy is conserved, there must be enough water in the wave front to carry the energy. Thus, the more quickly and further back the sea recedes prior to a wave, the more water is being taken into the wave front in order to propagate the energy in the wave front.
NOAA has some interesting tools here: (see http://nctr.pmel.noaa.gov/tsunami-foreca...)
So the consideration for any such floating city is the shoal depth. The oil rigs know this as well (pun intended), which is why they anchor themselves via a tether in really deep water (beyond the shoal depth for all but the most massive waves) and put their decks high above the reach of most other waves. If I were the planner, I would put as a permanent duo of city employees a meteorologist and a wavewatcher to go with a city engineer so they could constantly monitor for adverse weather conditions.
As with everything in engineering, it won't be perfect the first time.
The minute some nogoodnik with a sufficient naval force - or even a tango with a cheap submarine - decides that Atlantis X has a lot of goodies that it would like to have without buying, or that it's just an affront to Allah, well that's the end of Atlantis X.
I see nothing in this article about the inescapable problem of defense, and nothing any of the people quoted therein say indicates they've even considered the issue. If it were the year 1540 and the aquatic city-states were sufficiently fortified to repel galleon-class boats and cannonballs - yet somehow had present-day engineering technologies available - then the idea could work. But we're not living in Fantasyland, unfortunately. We're living in the looming specter of Islamofascism, Agenda 21 and global Orwellian collectivism.
Given an America restored to the general level of worldwide respect it had ca. 1950 and restored to the general level of Constitutional governance it had ca. 1776, the presence of a benevolent such superpower would allow for the advent of these kinds of things - but then, under those conditions most of the motivation to do it would also be removed because America itself would be much closer to the "Atlantis" ideal.
.
There you have the rub. California and the US are not going to give up tax revenues to homesteaders or seasteaders. They would condemn your water system and force you to buy there's. The same for sewer and electric. No doubt there would HOA fees for seasteaders, and I'd bet the county/state would find a way to assess real estate taxes. That would be fun to watch, real estate tax on a place with no real estate. The truth is they do that in every State for mobile homes, they call it personal property tax. If you moved the colony out to sea far enough the States wouldn't care, then we lose the flexibility of travel, commerce, and pleasures of being close to the mainland.
I hear a cry in the wilderness for an Atlantis like place for all of us. I will stick me neck out and say it's right here, under our feet. We just have to develop the same kind of grit and courage the founders had and clean house. Sometimes we feel no one cares. I think when things get bad enough, changes will be made. Right now we are 5 months from elections and gas is $4, the economy shrank 1% in the first quarter, and it will continue on that path as ObamaCare and fuel prices sap more and more disposable income out of the economy. Both have the same impact as taxes, they remove purchasing power from the economy. People have been hurt in ways they don't even realize yet, but they will. They are making grocery and gas decisions to pay the new medical insurance premium, wait until they have a sick kid and have to pay the deductible too. Wait until corporations start trimming the cost of medical for 90,000,000 people. Last fall was just a rehearsal. Wait until the system matures, like the Veteran's Administration. Government employees making decisions that are not connected to outcomes. Corporate climbing with a government twist. When those things happen, a hurt and angery populace will be eager to clean house, and let freedom ring.
which are immune to bad weather and well endowed
with fresh "water". an igloo on top of an iceberg ... a
geodesic dome covering the tip of an iceberg ... now,
all we need is the oceangoing tug to bring us the berg! -- j
back on an air mattress under a dome, on top of a
small island towed up from the Weddell Sea,
gazing at Cabo on the horizon from which nutrition
and friends arrive daily ... listening to your favorite
tunes on a steinway stereo (they start at about
$130k) and sipping on your favorite juice -- on ice?! -- j
p.s. http://www.steinwaylyngdorf.com/products...
Would they all end up like Christian Fletcher and his fellow mutineers?
Is this a Pitcairn island that the United Nations would leave alone?
I read a crappy Sci Fi book from the 60s about it. I can't find the title even in a DuckDuckGo search. Also Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy has Mars as his Gulch. He repeats the story in Antarctica. AJAshinoff shows the beginnings of a Gulch of sorts on Mars in Shadows Live Under Seashells. The thing is it's easier to build underwater than in space, and it's not at all easy to build in either place.
I hope a variety of these appear around the same time and come to challenge the very concept of the nation state.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Utopia
Lazarus Long (deceased in 2012) operated a "Web site to promote the so-called micronation tax haven, which he claimed was to be constructed on concrete platforms at the Misteriosa Bank 115 miles west of the Cayman Islands.[5][6][7] ". I then looked up Misteriosa Bank and found
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Misteriosa_...
The Misteriosa Bank is a submerged bank or atoll in the Caribbean Sea, located at WikiMiniAtlas
18°48′N 83°54′W / 18.800°N 83.900°W / 18.800; -83.900 – approximately equidistant from Mexico (380 km or 210 nmi), Honduras (345 km or 186 nmi) and Cuba (320 km or 170 nmi). The bank is 39 km (24 mi) long and 3 to 11 km (1.9 to 6.8 mi) wide. The area is 322 km2 (124 sq mi).[1] Immediately south of it is Rosario Bank. The closest piece of land is the Swan Islands, Honduras, 140 km (76 nmi) to the south and separated from it by the more than 5,000-metre-deep (16,000 ft) Cayman Trench. The reported depth is 20 metres (66 ft) on the average [5] or up to 22 metres (72 ft), with depths of 14–18 metres (46–59 ft) along the rim,[2] or 12.8–49 metres (42–161 ft) [6]. It is part of the Cayman Ridge.[3]
A buoy has been anchored to the seabed of this submerged peak of a sea mountain range that appears to have been claimed by the Principality of New Utopia. The placing of the buoy was filmed by a German film crew and broadcast by Arte television on satellite.
New Utopia maintains no state claims it, and wants to build a kind of micronation on top of it, using concrete blocks.
Charles Darwin's Coral Reefs mentions the Misteriosa Bank as an example of the sharply declining coral reef:
"Besides the coast-banks, there are many of various dimensions which stand quite isolated; these closely resemble each other, they lie from two or three to twenty or thirty fathoms [4 to 55 m] under water, and are composed of sand, sometimes firmly agglutinated, with little or no coral; their surfaces are smooth and nearly level, shelving only to the amount of a few fathoms, very gradually all round towards their edges, where they plunge abruptly into the unfathomable sea. This steep inclination of their sides, which is likewise characteristic of the coast-banks, is very remarkable: I may give as an instance, the Misteriosa Bank, on the edges of which the soundings change in 250 fathoms [460 m] horizontal distance, from 11 to 210 fathoms [20 to 380 m]..."
How fitting would it be for an AR community to be built on an underwater reef once discussed by Charles Darwin?!
If I learned the basics of writing, I could do better than maybe half the sci fi I've read on this topic, although that's only because some of it is really bad.