Mira endorsement, check

https://x.com/RokoMijic/status/1869523362135040037

FYI There is a set of slides from the talk I gave on this at hereticon

https://www.scribd.com/document/786931939/Real-Seasteading-Has-Never-Been-Tried-Roko-Mijic

@Roko Polls don't lie

@houstonEuler ???

@Roko Have you considered using pykrete?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Habakkuk

@TimothyJohnson5c16 Slide 25

@Roko I was calling you a retard.

"There will still be rules, they’ll just be different (better?) rules"

You're over-engineering technically for a social problem.

Zuck bought an island in Hawaii for less than 300 million dollars. Just go do that, setup your government with different rules, and then copy/paste onto an iceberg.

@Roko In all of this, have you even once considered adverse selection?

You're trying to create a government for people who hate rules, and actively try to undermine them.

How do you get tens of thousands of self-centered individualists to care for and work towards the collective good of your proto-society?

How do you prevent the military from overthrowing your government at the first sign of trouble?

There are 14-year-olds who've start on your path, then quickly realized "this is fucking retarded", yet you've somehow managed to blow far past that point, entering a new realm of retardation that you've conveniently laid out in a Powerpoint.

So...congratulations?...I guess...

dont listen to him roko

@jim Please don't feed the anarcho-cucks.

@houstonEuler > "You're trying to create a government for people who hate rules,"

No, I never said that. I don't really understand where you're getting this stuff from. Anyway right now I am more concerned with whether it technically works.

@Roko "I don't really understand where you're getting this stuff from."

Polls don't lie.

The usual fatal flaw of these libertarian schemes to set up places outside existing governments is the (strange) underestimation of the hostility of existing governments to them.

(The Republic of Minerva didn't fail because of technical problems with land reclamation, or trouble with parsing jurisdiction under international law; the would-be neighboring countries simply chose not to tolerate it, and allocated the task of crushing it to Tonga.)

In that context, seasteading is unusually not-stupid because the basics of starting up (like buying ships on the open market) are actually the sort of thing that could fly under the radar for a while, giving a chance (however low) that an attempt might possibly manage to transition from "too inconsequential to be assuredly crushed" to "too valuable to simply kill" faster than governments can react.

In that same context, icesteading is unusually stupid, because the capital involved in setting it up is so unusual and extensive. An attempt at creating an icestead would be crushed long before it was functional.

@SEE I think you would just set it up far from any existing nations, so nobody would have an incentive to crush it (collective action problem). Also get support from Elon, Thiel, etc so you have some of the most powerful people in the world on your side.

https://x.com/RokoMijic/status/1823709188096164094

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YEReRb8rDCw

don't we already have a 5.5 million square mile "ice-based continent" that we don't use?

too cold, idea is to have comfy spot in the Pacific Ocean

Don't icebergs have a tendency to melt and collapse the moment they leave the polar regions? Seems it would be more effective to just have a fleet of ships

the plan's to have really big ones and insulate them so they melt really slowly. And there's some kind of effect that stops the ice at the top from melting I think?

oh you just refrigerate it which is cheap apparently

Refrigerating an entire ice continent doesn't sound cheap lol, seems like something from xkcd How To or some shit

You manufacture it in a polar region so it's cheap, insulate, then add some heat pumps to offset the small amount that leaks through. The square-cube law works in your favor for bigger objects.

@TheAllMemeingEye pay about 3-10MW of cooling per square kilometer. This is quite small.

@Roko That actually does seem relatively small - if my calculation is right, you can get that just by covering 1% of your island with solar panels.

@TimothyJohnson5c16 @Roko big if true, would you mind sharing your calculations? Also is this still cheaper to create and maintain per area than a bunch of ships?

@TheAllMemeingEye

Yes, this is a document with most of the critical calculations.
https://www.transhumanaxiology.com/p/the-icesteading-living-whitepaper

@Roko thanks

So the true cost of this ship may be more like $2bn + 37% * $10.6bn = $5.9bn, which is quite similar to the cost of the icestead excluding its maintenance

If the costs are similar, it seems like it would be smarter to start with ships (since they are a well established working technology you can buy without rousing geopolitical suspicion) then experiment with icesteads once you have a foothold and successful track record of running the nation

@TheAllMemeingEye

The ship has something like 100 times less living area for the same cost, and is vulnerable to kinetic attacks, and requires lots of maintenance that can only be done at a major dry dock, etc.

@Roko ah, thanks

Btw @jim I officially retract my vote for retarded, it's not definitely genius either, but clearly has enough thought put into it that it's not just a half baked scheme that collapses under the first criticism like I thought, and may be worth genuinely looking into, especially experimentally testing the major technical risks mentioned at the end of his linked post