Hello, and welcome to this presentation on seasteading.
My name is Grant Romant. I'm from Ocean Builders.
And today we'll be talking about how to hack the sea pod.
And the sea pod, we'll talk about what that is a little bit later.
People usually ask me first, though, what is a seastead?
And basically, a seastead is a home that is engineered to float on the ocean.
People have been fascinated with living on the water.
People have been fascinated with living on the ocean.
And even the idea of building an entire city that floats on the ocean.
And this has been an idea for a very long time.
But no one has actually done it. No one's cracked the code on this.
We've seen some beautiful images. We've seen some beautiful pictures.
Like here's some conceptual drawings of images of these whole entire floating communities that were beautiful.
The problem with them, the reason why this hasn't happened yet, is because this costs a lot of money to do.
This is like a multi-billion dollar project just to get started, not even to really do very much at all.
Building a city is a huge thing that is usually done in small increments, where you start small and then it grows bigger and bigger and bigger.
And to start something on the water, it actually costs a lot more than doing it on land.
And no one's really cracked the code on how to make it affordable to do.
And until last year, February 3rd of 2019, something monumental happened and a huge milestone was made.
And the first original prototype of the single home seastead was launched.
I'll just play the video here so you can see it.
This was in Thailand, 13 miles outside of the coast of Thailand by Phuket.
And it was beautiful, it was amazing.
Well, it was a beautiful thing, but the prototype itself was not very attractive, not very pretty.
But the technology to do this is the same technology that is used on an oil rig, where you have a deep spar.
You can see a metal pole going into the water and the house actually just floats on top of it.
But the metal pole goes really deep into the water and creates a source of buoyancy, which pushes the house that's above the water up.
And then, basically, your house is above the waves.
So you don't have to worry about big waves coming and making your house move around.
And it's actually very stable because of this, because you're not at the surface of the water level.
So it's actually very stable and nice to live in.
What I loved when I saw this was that I saw that this could be the new frontier.
It's like many years ago, America was the new frontier.
It was this new land to be discovered, new opportunities, incredible new opportunities.
I believe that if we do this right on the ocean, that the ocean can be the new frontier.
So this is really exciting.
I think there's so many technologies that can come from this.
So I kind of have the philosophy that we should do the ocean first and then Mars.
It doesn't make any sense to spend tens of billions of dollars to send something to Mars,
when we can actually, for a very small fraction of that, we can start building thriving ecosystems on the ocean today.
Like right now, the technology is here.
So it's really exciting because I think maybe 10 years ago, we didn't have all the technology to do this, to make this feasible.
But now like all this technology is evolving, it's coming available very, very quickly.
And it's to the point where we can put all these technologies together and make them work
and make a home on the ocean that is affordable and is eco-restorative and has all these other incredible benefits.
So I think the opportunities are very exciting.
But when I first was on the original Seastead by Thailand, it was really ugly.
It was a diamond in the rough.
You had to have a lot of imagination to see where it could go because it was not pretty.
So we've spent a lot of time since then to redesign it, to make it sexy, to make it beautiful,
to make it inspiring to want to actually live there.
So we have our new design model that is called the Seapod.
So Seastead is a basic class of this kind of floating home idea.
So with every major innovation, major change, sometimes that is such a dramatic change that it causes fear in some people.
And that happened in Thailand.
And if you hadn't heard, our project became very well known because the Thai Navy actually decided to invade our Seastead.
And it was frontline headline news around the world.
Most major newspapers, TV shows, radio programs covered the story because we were actually on the run for a long time.
The Thai Navy was chasing our team and they were threatening the death penalty and life in jail and saying that this was a threat to...
like this was an act of terrorism and all kinds of things.
So it was... at the time it was horrible, but now in retrospect, it brought a lot of attention to the whole movement.
And it's actually, I think it's helped a lot, but just, you know, while it was going through, it was kind of a little bit scary.
So some of the media that's covered us is like all the big names that you would recognize and know.
So we almost ended up in one of these, which is a Thai prison, which is someplace you don't want to end up.
It does not look like a comfortable place to be at all.
But as Chow said in the movie The Hangover, but did you die?
And the answer is no, we didn't.
And here is our hero picture to prove that we survived after the big rescue, which a whole book and a movie is being written about because it had all the elements of a James Bond thriller kind of movie.
So it's pretty interesting what happened.
So now we are in Panama. This is the location where we will be building the first community of homes.
And this is the exact island that we will be on where our manufacturing plant is in construction.
This is the early pictures. This was back in February.
We've gone a lot further now. These pictures have not been, these are the first time these pictures are being shown.
This is our manufacturing plant now, mostly built. We're still missing the front door, but that's okay because things are going on inside.
So we're going to show you during the live part of the presentation here, we'll be showing you some more pictures, some of the things we've been building, some of the things we're putting in the water.
And so we're and we'll talk about a lot of the technologies we're going to be developing.
And that's one of the really exciting things about these, this thing, is that to be able to live on the water, we need to develop so many different kinds of technologies.
And so many, we need to innovate so many different things that haven't existed before because we haven't been, we haven't had a need to live on the water and do it in a way that's eco-sustainable.
Because the way we've built homes and built a life for ourselves on land has not been good for the environment.
We usually clear cut a forest before we put a house up. And that's just not, not good.
But when we put something in, when we build something in the water, it actually becomes a habitat for life.
And we're trying to do it in a way that life can actually thrive and actually add more life to the ocean instead of damaging it.
So there's a lot of really innovative technologies we're working on for the CPOD.
And we're really excited about a lot of these things. We have a huge 3D printer, we'll show you some pictures of that later.
It's 20 feet long by 16 feet wide and 8 feet tall.
And our goal is to eventually be able to print an entire house with a 3D printer.
We're not there yet. We're right now starting with printing molds and then making the houses from the molds itself.
There's a lot of IoT technology we're developing, home automation for a home on the water, which is very different.
We're developing hydroponics so your home can be self-sufficient.
We're developing aquaculture systems, coral gardens.
So you can actually, instead of having a front lawn with a garden, you'll actually have an underwater coral garden, potentially as an option.
There's aquatic transport drones we're building to be able to transport garbage and take out the garbage, basically, to take out the trash.
You'd have an automated drone that comes out and does that.
We have desalinization technology we're developing.
There's marine sensor stations we're developing so we can get advanced notice on what the weather is going to be like and what the marine conditions are like.
And we can actually monitor what the conditions of the ocean are.
So we can actually measure over a sustained period of time, or a long period of time, what the environmental impact of living on the water is.
And we can actually show scientifically that our homes are actually helping to restore coral in the area because we're going to be doing a number of different projects to help restore the marine ecosystem.
One thing is to be able to 3D print a coral design that has the optimal shape that coral polyps love to live in.
And we can do that by scanning existing coral and see the exact shape of kind of like a little nook that they like to live in.
So we can recreate that in 3D printing designs.
Then there's other techniques. There's like five or six different techniques for doing coral restoration that we're developing as well.
And we're hoping to partner with other companies that are doing these things because there's so many different things that need to be developed to make this happen.
So we're kind of trying to reach out to the community. We're trying to reach out to people and say, hey, you know, this is the new frontier.
I think this is the most exciting thing humanity has on the go right now that is possible and feasible for anyone to just say, I want to get involved and actually make it happen.
And it's feasible. It's not like doing a startup and going to Mars. That's a massive project. It takes a lot of money.
This is something we can do. We can actually decentralize a lot of the development of this technology.
So people around the world that are right now on lockdown maybe and don't have a lot to do can actually find ways of contributing to this project.
So that brings me to something that I'm really excited. We're announcing it first here on this conference is that we are releasing all of our technology.
We're releasing all of the programs we're doing and we're releasing the designs of our seapods, all the software and releasing it to be open source.
And we're doing this because we want this to happen. We are not doing this for any other reason than we are passionate about it.
We love it. We love the idea of being able to live on the ocean, being able to open this new frontier, being able to develop new technologies, eco-sustainable technologies, marine restoration technologies.
And all the other things that need to be developed to make this happen. It's really exciting. We're all just... there's a lot of... there's a very big community of seasteaders.
There's actually a big community at DEF CON that's like big on seasteading. But outside of that as well, there's a huge community that are really passionate about seeing this happen.
So we have like a decentralized team all over the world that we're trying to get them to collaborate and get them to focus on different areas of development.
And if we can do this, I think we can make like 20 years of development progress in the next couple of years if we can do this right, if we can really focus and find a way to make it happen.
It's really exciting time for us. And we hope to kind of put the call out to the community here and say, well, who wants to be involved in this? Who wants to help out with this?
Who wants to contribute? Whether it's just writing a little bit of software code or maybe making a design for a floating drone or your own floating house design that you think might be better than what we're doing.
And you can actually take our designs. You can take our software code. You can take our designs that I've been sweating over for the last year plus. And you can say, well, that's really beautiful. I love it. But I want it to be longer. I want it to be taller. I want it to be a different shape. I want whatever it is.
You can take our CAD drawings, which are being... everything's in the process of being uploaded. Hopefully by the time this presentation starts, a lot of our code is going to be on our GitHub account. So you'll be able to go there and download code and start playing with things, which is what we want to see happen. We want to see this progress. We want to see this move. And it's just really exciting. I think we can do a lot.
And I'm kind of inspired by the idea of this lockdown for a lot of people has been horrible. It's been kind of boring. It's been a time of frustration. And I think we can maybe turn things around. And what if we could mobilize millions and tens of millions of people around the world to actually do something productive with their time?
If we had millions of people contributing just a couple hours a day to different projects that they're passionate about, put all that together, and we could have an incredibly different world, new ideas, new techniques, new things that we weren't even thinking about before. They can develop very quickly. But we have to just try to find a way to focus their energies into something that is productive.
And I think we have a track here for developing technologies on the ocean to build floating homes and a floating ecosystem that can thrive and has a lot of potential, I think, for humanity. So I'm really excited about it. I'm really excited about opening this up to the open source community and having you guys take what we've been looking at and what we've been trying to do and what the Seasteading community in general has been trying to do.
And we want to move this forward. So I invite you to take part in the whole conversation we're going to be having here today. We're going to be sharing a lot of things we haven't shared publicly before and giving a lot of things away. So yeah, we'd love to have you involved.
Yes, we have mobile app. All the code for mobile apps is being uploaded. It's probably going to be here by the time we start this presentation. The backend software for controlling seapods, controlling floating homes is all going to be there. IoT software, it's still in development, but we might have something to upload by the time this conference starts. IoT hardware. We have all kinds of things coming together.
So we'll be posting our plans for hydroponic system that is really cool. I think it's a super high yield technique for growing food that I'm really excited about. We'll be putting, as soon as we have Gerber files for the actual circuit design for our home automation hardware, we will be publishing that as well. So it's very exciting. Lots of stuff going on.
So CAD drawings for all our models, CAD drawings for our boats. And once again, we just want to open it up. And if you have a better design or newer design, or maybe there's parts that we're missing that need to be designed, we're just asking for people to, if they're passionate about this, to contribute and see where we can take this. I think we can take this to something really incredible.
So we're going to start now a movie that we made to kind of show what's been happening with Seasteading. What happened with our event in Thailand and the whole controversy that happened over there. So this is a little presentation that kind of takes you through all that. So hope you enjoy it. Then we'll come back and we'll go into the live section.
Welcome to Ixli, or Seastead. So you come in from this beautiful entrance. Here's the kitchen, where Nadia does all of her magic.
Anything special about the kitchen? Just fresh water. No problem. We could refill as needed, but we've never had to do that because we have a water maker. This is the big kitchen table. Underneath is actually where this bar entrance goes. I would lift it to show you, but there's food all over it.
We have a nice little electric room. Understand electricity. There's a lot of little hidden storage all over this. It's a good size with a little bin closet.
A nice little bathroom. A nice little shower. Pretty decent size. It should be great for all these small home welders out here.
So beautiful. Yeah, alright. We've got some islands off in the distance. So that's only, he said, 20 miles out. You can go and spend a day on the island if you're a little tired of just floating around. So plenty of the sea out here. All within a short sailing distance. Alright, that's it.
I read an article in the Thai media saying, talked about the sea stead. Basically right out of the bat saying it was a threat to national security. I can't see how they would see a loving couple living in their home on the water as a threat to national security.
We understand how the media works in Thailand. They're basically a mouthpiece for the government. So anything the government needs to do, they just use the media to express it. Basically set the narrative so that the people know where they stand.
There's some contacts we have with the military. We contacted them. They said, yep, they're all up in arms about your sea stead. The military is at the top level. They're beating their chests. They're trying to one-up each other. Who can shoot it down the best.
Just in the middle of the night we were trekking through mud. Pushing our knees out at low tide. Trying to quietly get out of Phuket. It was all, all stories were BS. The way things work in Thailand is it's a military dictatorship.
So if they want somebody, if somebody's giving them trouble, or they think they're giving them trouble, they just take them out. So we're not going to take the chance. There's no due process.
They obviously displayed by taking out our sea stead. Destroyed our home. I had everything I owned there. I just have a bag with some clothes that I was in Phuket. Unfortunately I was in Phuket at the time. Otherwise they probably just taken us down with a sea stead.
Chad Elwartowski's sister says sea steading has been a dream for him, but one that has now turned into a nightmare.
Oh my God, I'm sick. I'm just so sick about it. I just want him home.
Family and friends of Chad Elwartowski fear his life is on the line. He and his girlfriend are now on the run after Thai police officials accused them of essentially trying to lay claim to Thai territory with their floating house.
It all of a sudden changed to where he became a fugitive. It was almost like you're reading something out of a movie.
My greatest fear is that he's going to end up killed through all this.
They were just living there. They didn't build it. They didn't buy it. They were living on the sea stead. But now they are hunted as criminals.
I used to FaceTime him and be able to see my brother and now I can't. I can't see where he is. I can't talk to him. It's killing me. I'm sorry. It's hard.
And we're also trying to communicate with Chad ourselves. We'll let you know if he's able to reply. Kimberly Craig, 7 Action News.
She's Thai. So she's her family. Her son was supposed to start school this week.
She's been trying to sign him up. Had to go in this week to go take care of that but she can't.
This is all messed up. The doubles are resolved. The sea steading has to happen.
We're obviously still... I mean this week was a whole hit on freedom. We need to show that we can have new governments.
We were free on the sea stead. We lived just for a moment. And it was great.
When I die at my funeral I'd like them to show that I lived a life.
So far we're safe. We're here for our lives. Nadia and I are very worried. It's been hard for both of us.
So far we're still alive. That's all we're trying to do is stay alive.
Hey, hello everyone. Well, so hopefully that gives you a good overview of what we are doing, what we're about,
and just kind of the plan A to B from a very high level.
But excited to be here today to be able to speak with you all and share with you our vision of what we're trying to do.
Like I said at the beginning, we see this as the new frontier.
This is almost an undiscovered country because people have never really been able to build a home that can float on the water,
that can be in international waters, on the ocean. And so we kind of cracked the code a little bit with this.
And what I'm really excited about is just in the last week, like I shared just before,
we are now announcing that we are open sourcing all the technology, all the software, all the hardware,
everything we're going to be developing for making this happen is going to be open source.
And it's on our GitHub right now. Hope you guys can hear me right now.
And if you have any questions, post it in either the general text area or the Seasteading text area.
And I'll try to answer your questions or whatever you have while we're on live here.
And I'm going to share my screen. And let's see right here.
Okay, hopefully you can see my screen. So like I showed earlier, this is the original prototype.
It wasn't anything special to look at, but when we were sailing towards it for the first time and we saw it there,
first it was off in the distance, there's this little white dot, and it was just getting bigger and bigger and bigger.
And it was just, it was an amazing thing to be there because it felt like this represented something like a whole new thing
that's starting from scratch, like the whole new frontier was starting from this just one little dot.
And it was really exciting to approach it and see it getting bigger and bigger.
And then to actually be there and then to actually step foot on the Seastead. That was pretty amazing.
I was involved in a project called Freedom Ship about 20 years ago, which was a project to build a floating ship
that would travel all over the world every two years and stop at different ports of call as it went along.
So it would stop around different cities and different countries around the world.
So I thought that was just the most amazing thing because it felt like, wow, this was really an amazing...
you get to live at home on your, you know, one of the 20,000 condos that would be on this floating ship.
But you could also see the world, which I thought was a really fantastic idea.
The problem with that is it was going to cost like seven or eight billion dollars to start.
So it just couldn't get off the ground because that's so much momentum that you need to do to get to that point
that it's just really hard to do that. I mean, who has seven or eight billion dollars hanging around to start that kind of a project?
So what I loved about this when I saw this was that this only cost $150,000 to build the first project.
That's just building one. So the idea was if we built like 20, the cost would go down and be even more affordable for people.
And so when I first got involved, the units looked like this, and that was not very attractive,
and it's not something that really inspires people to want to live there.
So we felt it was really important to... well, I felt it was really important to make it something that when you looked at it,
you said, wow, that's beautiful, or that's amazing, or that kind of inspires you to want to visit,
to be able to experience it, to see it for yourself with your own eyes, or to just walk on it and see what it's like,
and check it out, and just inspire some curiosity.
So that was kind of started a whole... it's been like a year and a half of major redesign that we've been doing.
So now the houses kind of look like... it's the same kind of general structure, but now it's like something with Jetsons,
rather than something out of, I don't know, something much more prehistoric.
So I think we have a beautiful design now, and so we are in Panama, like I shared.
This is one of our renderings for the new design.
I think it's beautiful. Some people love it, some people don't.
But I think most people think it's pretty darn interesting and looks a lot better than our project.
So I think it's... I really wanted to capture the idea that this is a futuristic thing,
that this can be a futuristic and technological achievement,
because the technology that goes into making this is very, very simple, but it just hasn't been done before.
We've had this technology to make this happen for the structure for a very long time.
It's the same structural backbone as making the oil rig, where you have this big hole that goes into the ground,
or not into the ground, sorry, into the water.
It's kind of like when you have a wine bottle, you throw it in the water, it'll just float.
And then it stays afloat, because it'll just stay there forever.
But it kind of bops around and it's not very stable.
So what we do to make this very stable is we put a very heavy weight underneath, very far below the water.
And that's about 100 tons of weight, like 100 tons, that's a lot of weight.
You wouldn't want to have that fall on your foot.
So it's very heavy, and so that makes it very stable.
And then we tie it down with three mooring lines, so it's locked in place.
It's very adverse to bad weather, because normally, when you're in the water, waves come along, and your boat is moved around a lot by the waves.
But in our case, you can see from the designs here that the house is about two and a half meters off the water, so the waves pass it.
There's only a little bit of interaction between the waves and the poles, because it's just a fairly thin area, and the waves just kind of go around.
So we're excited about it, and we're building in Panama.
Like I said, we're open sourcing, which is something we're announcing officially here.
We've started getting all our code on our GitHub account, so you can go there right now.
We have software for mobile apps that will be able to control your smart home, your floating smart home.
Actually, our code is written in Flutter, so it can be used for both iOS, Android, as well as for web apps.
So it's a really nice little platform, so it goes all three ways.
And so right now, we have the beta there. It's released into the Android store, but not yet into the Apple store.
So you can go there on the Android store, if you have an Android, and check it out.
I think you just search for Ocean Builders, and you can find it.
But on our GitHub, we created several different repos for different projects that we're really excited about.
And I'll show you some of the projects we're really excited about.
And for anyone that signs up to do any of our challenges, we're going to give you some exclusive first-look details
on some of the things we're working on.
There are some things breaking right now that I can't talk about yet, but should be able to in about two weeks.
So anyone that signs up for our challenge, you'll get first access to some of those details.
And my mind is blown by all the stuff that's going on right now.
We're making more progress in the last two weeks than most of the seasteading history has made in the last 10 years.
It's really exciting to see, and it's really moving fast, so it's like trying to keep up with it.
So part of the reason I wanted to do this conference was to reach out to people like you guys
that are passionate about building really cool things, hacking the future, hacking technology,
and finding ways to make technology work better for us.
And that can be in so many different kinds of ways.
That can be from writing software, hardware, figuring out new hardware,
and building different devices that have never really existed before because there hasn't been so much of a need.
We've never had a floating city before, so this will create a whole new wave of entrepreneurism
that can create all new kinds of technologies.
And I think a lot of the technologies that will have to be invented to live on this kind of floating future
would be a pretty breakthrough and pretty amazing.
Oh, there's some text over there. I'll see if you guys have any questions.
Waterworld.
So some people say, yes, this is like Waterworld.
And I kind of reply to that, this is more like the Jetsons on the water.
So it's protecting from that.
So probably a stupid question, why have the log smaller than the part where people live, what purpose the log serves?
I'm not sure.
Not sure what you're talking about.
Relationship between... I'm just going to take some live questions here while you guys are asking them.
I was wondering a bit about the relationship with the local communities and areas you're building in,
for example, outreach and support or support.
So that's something we're really trying to emphasize a lot this year.
Now, because we've learned what not to do in the past, and we're trying to improve and make things better.
So we're actually in Panama, like I said.
And when this whole pandemic started, we have like some very large scale 3D printers.
One is 20 feet long by 16 feet wide and 8 feet tall, made by RectorBot.com.
And then we have another one that's one meter by one meter by one meter.
So they're huge.
So we wanted to see if there's something we could do with printing emergency medical supplies.
So we're actually working with the government of Panama to help 3D print emergency medical supplies.
We were on it right away at the beginning of the pandemic.
The government took a little bit of time to set up all the regulatory procedures
for how things would need to be certified for health use and all that.
So that took them a little bit of time.
But I think they're almost ready to go.
So if there is a second wave, we're all set up.
All the health stuff is all ready to go.
So we're ready to start going into production with making emergency medical supplies
or parts for hospitals, for machines in hospitals or anywhere else that they might need supplies.
So we'll be able to help out there.
We're creating a lot of jobs.
We're creating high tech jobs as well.
And we're bringing foreign investment into the country.
So we're doing a lot.
We also several times every couple weekends, we do deliver food to communities that have been impacted by coronavirus.
So we're definitely doing as much outreach as we can.
So 100 tons is feasible to move.
There's a couple different versions we're working on.
There's the deep water spar model that goes about 35 meters deep total.
And that has 100 ton weight at the bottom.
So that's not very easy to move at all.
The other one is a shallow water model.
And that is only about five meters deep.
And that's much easier to move.
They can all be moved, but they're not really made to be moved.
Now, we are considering designs that would allow you to fully move your house.
But that's an experimental thing.
We're actively building tests and prototypes right now to test that.
So it's kind of cool. Actually, I think I have a picture of those.
One of the prototypes. This is actually one of the prototypes of the movable version.
This would be the hull that goes under the water.
Which is kind of an interesting design.
Oh, here it is, actually.
So you can't really see too much, but this is a small 1-8th scale size of just a transport vessel using the same technology.
So instead of having a normal-shaped boat, this actually is called a swath.
So it has two hulls that go under the water.
So this is one hull here.
And the other one's on the other side, kind of out of focus here.
Then you have these arms that go down.
And the water line would be about here and here.
And then the base, the house, or the vessel, the boat, where people, passengers would sit, would be on top.
So it kind of rides above... it's the same kind of idea.
It rides above the waves.
And the reason we make this is that we found when we had the first seastead, it was hard to get from point A to point B when there's big waves.
And it was hard to be able to go to your house and pick people up or whatever.
We designed this kind of craft to be able to break through very high waves and still get places where the weather's not so good.
Let's see... we have some more questions.
Is it possible without polluting the ocean? Yes.
Our first seastead in Thailand was... it was 13 miles from shore.
And what's interesting was when you're that far away from shore, there's no life in the water.
People think that the ocean is filled with life, but there's really not a lot of life.
There is... it's just water mostly, because there's no place for water, for life to congregate around.
So we put our spa into the water, and two months later, there's thousands and thousands of fish around.
It was just... there was a lot. It was hard to... you couldn't look anywhere and not see thousands of fish.
We have video of that. It was pretty astounding.
So, can you do it without polluting? We're actually creating an environment for fish,
so we actually are building our homes in a way that is eco-restorative.
We have some ways of composting our toilet water, so it actually becomes compost.
There's some methods of using electrocoagulation for treating ray water instead of using other processes.
Electrocoagulation is a fantastic technology that's not really used very much,
and we have a version of it that I think is an improvement of what else is being used.
So, let's see. Jump through some other things here.
Some other questions here.
Okay, there's... oh, thanks, Pierce Nichols, for the swath link there.
Okay, so we have some projects. I'd like to just go over them.
We're actually going through time here pretty quickly.
So, I'll give you a bit of an overview. This is our manufacturing plant.
We started building just before... this was like early February.
We just started putting the concrete in for the bases for the poles for the frame for the manufacturing plant.
Now, this was about two weeks ago, this picture, so now the plant is up, which is... yay!
We got some work done even during a global lockdown.
We did little pieces here and there, but it was a lot slower, obviously.
So, we're about three months behind, but we're forging ahead as fast as we can.
This is a pretty huge building.
It will house two CPODs without the pole, of course, inside at a time, so we can produce two at a time at this location.
Here's a view of the inside.
This is our roller machine, so our round spars that go into the water that you saw in the pictures, those will be rolled on this machine.
You put these big slabs of flat steel, and it goes through and rolls it, and then it bends it a little bit,
and then you go through it again and bends it, bends it, bends it, and you keep on putting it through until you get the right curvature on the steel.
I haven't seen it in person myself, because I'm in Canada right now, because I left before the lockdown, so I can get some things done up here.
We have a full team down in Panama working as well.
This is our main engineer, Rüdiger Koch, who is a German aerospace engineer.
He started Seasteading because he wanted to go to space, and he decided that he needed Seasteads to be able to have as a platform
to observe the places where he would be launching his vehicles into space, or things that he would be sending up into space, so he's definitely a pioneer.
So this is a view of him looking through one of the molds that goes to the central spar inside the house.
Here's some more images.
And let's see, this is our development site where we're actually going to be putting the homes into the water.
This is our... we set up a technology incubator, so...
I don't know if this video will play.
Then...
Yeah, so we set up a technology incubator where we have people from all over the world coming down to help us figure out really cool technologies to build and to put into these.
We have all kinds of really fantastic technologies that I'm really super excited about.
I'll talk about those soon.
This is a video of me swimming around the underwater spar of the original prototype in Thailand.
And there's just thousands of fish, even more and more and more as the video goes on.
So I can't jump ahead on the way it's lined up.
It's pretty cool.
This is us in Panama, we're launching another prototype.
This is a one third scale, but one third scale is actually very large still.
So we're towing it out to the site.
And here we're standing on it.
And so this is the spar.
So the full scale size would be three times wider, three times taller, three times longer.
This is just the pole and then the base to test some engineering principles.
So I'm going to jump to talk about some of the projects we are really passionate about.
One is the Aqua Boy, we're calling it.
Names may change, but we'll post the exact details of this.
I guess we'll coordinate with DEF CON about all the details of this.
But this is the basic idea.
The vision of what it might look like and all the specifications may change and be modified and refined.
But the idea is that we'd have this like a water boy that would just collect data.
And data for us is really important because if there's a big storm brewing a couple miles away,
we might want to know, we might want to get back to our seastead and just prepare it for rough weather.
Or do whatever we need to do.
Or if we're out fishing nearby, we might want to go home and tie up the boats or something like that.
So we'd like to have a remote beacon that can check weather, check wave heights,
see if there's some big huge rogue wave coming our way.
We'll be able to monitor weather at different locations so it can check wave height.
So movement from this flat average sea level and then if the sensor goes up 2-3 feet,
then goes down 2-3 feet below the horizon, then we know the wave height is like 4 feet.
And we'll know the time between the maximum heights, between the height and then when it goes to the lowest point to the highest point.
So we'll be able to measure the time in between the period, the wave period, the wave length as well,
because we'll know the time in between.
So we can get some really valuable data.
So we can collect data underneath the water as well as above the water.
We can collect turbidity levels, oxygen levels, pH levels, all kinds of really cool things we can collect.
We can even have cameras under there and collect data on nearby ecosystems
and see what the coral is like there and just monitor over time.
We can have some instruments on the top to measure air temperature and whatever other factors, humidity or whatever.
And then what's really exciting about this is also we may look at going into new areas we've never been into before
and we might put these buoys, areas that we've never been that we want to look at,
maybe for putting a whole community there in five years or in two years.
But we can put a buoy there and collect data for a year and just see what the average conditions are
throughout a year or two of collecting data.
Like, is that a good place to be? Are the waves usually good there,
but then there's some crazy wave that really makes it not a nice place to live?
And we can get some really good valuable data from that for ourselves,
for where we might want to use to do sea study.
But maybe there's also useful data we can collect for environmental purposes,
environmental monitoring, share it with organizations that track the effect of different water temperatures on coral.
We can have cameras and see what the effect is of different water temperatures
and different water conditions on coral in the area.
So we can do some really cool things with this data.
And if we had like 10 of these all over Panama where we're located,
then we can maybe crunch it with AI and get some really, really cool, useful information.
The aqua buoy would be geostationary.
So we'd ideally like to hold it in place and we'd have one of our engineers figure out what the best way of doing that is.
Yes, so we have a signup page pinned on the Seasteading chat on our channel here.
So sign up there. We have tons of projects that we're very excited about.
We're going to pick a winner for all these different projects.
We're going to, I guess, we'll pick that next year at DEFCON in Vegas.
Maybe put some of these in the water and see who performs the best.
And then we'll have some really cool prizes. We'll feature you as a contributor, as a winning participant.
We have tons of media that's always trying to cover us because we're doing some pretty interesting things sometimes.
We want to highlight our partners and people that we're collaborating with.
So I think there's some really cool, fun opportunities.
There will be some cash prizes, and we will be picking someone that wins from participating in some of our projects to fly them down to Panama and give them a couple days on a Seastead so you can experience it for yourself.
So I think it's some really fun, cool stuff we have.
We're building the future, and the future is floating, and it's really exciting.
So let's see if there's any more here.
How do you power? How do you...
Okay, so how are we powered?
We will be... the default system of power will be solar.
So we have to be pretty conservative with power.
We will have, of course, batteries, and we're looking at using a propane backup.
So if the batteries run really low, then we can switch on a propane backup, propane-powered backup.
And then hopefully, in the not-too-distant future, we'll be able to make methane from seaweed and then use that in our generators as a backup power source.
We're also looking at some potential power generation from the water itself.
So using OTEC. It's a little bit tricky to use, but we may have a way of solving that on a small-scale version of OTEC, which is Ocean Thermal Electrical Conversion.
And wave generators and some other things that we're looking at.
We have some people that we're partnering with that have some wave generators that they're developing in St. Lucia.
So we may partner with them to bring that to Panama as well.
Some of the other projects I'll mention quickly is... let's see...
AquaCycle... no, let's not talk about that one.
So many projects. Build Identification with ML.
So I guess the one that Nina was talking about yesterday would be a swimmer.
So we would be doing the Aquaboy.
The AquaScanner is really, really cool technology.
The idea that was suggested originally, and this can change, would be to have a really inexpensive add-on that you can add to any normal drone.
That would be like an array of cameras that you could dip in a grid over the water.
So you could have a grid like this. Each of these red dots would be a point where the drone, the array of cameras would go into the water.
And then that takes pictures with three cameras under the water at an angle.
So you get three pictures at this way, 120 degrees offset from that, and another 120 degrees offset from that.
So you actually get, you can put all these pictures together and get like a 3D image.
We call it photo photometry, I think it's called.
And you stitch all these images together and you actually get a 3D recreate.
You can recreate a full 3D recreation of the surface of the underwater landscape, which is breathtakingly beautiful.
And I think it's really important for research to be able to do something like this because you can see what is going on with the ocean live as it's happening.
And you can do it year after year and year after year and compare to see what's going on with the ocean, what's going on with the coral.
And you can see if there's improvement in any areas and if there's a reduction in or depletion in any areas.
You can also put different sensors on these, on the scanners, detect other things like pH or other things we want to measure.
And then we'll have, we have this incredible database of highly precise data that's mapped very, very quickly and very inexpensively because this really shouldn't cost very much.
So we have all these things pinned on our seasteading page, on our seasteading channel. So please check that out.
Underwater drones would be great. Yeah, we'd love to have some underwater drones.
I'd love to coordinate, I think, with Dave, who was supposed to be on the talk yesterday with Nina, talking about how to do underwater IoT.
So I'd love to be in on that as well.
Let's see if there's anything else. I have just a few minutes left, so I want to make sure I cover as much as I can.
So basically, we wanted to come here because we wanted to really reach out to people to help, because I think this is like the most exciting thing that's going on on the planet right now.
Maybe I'm a little bit biased, but I think this is.
There's so many technologies that can come from this, because we need to develop technology to be able to live successfully on the water.
So we're kind of doing a call to action here. We want this to happen. We're excited about this happening.
And we're opening. We're so excited about it. We're opening all the technology up to be open source.
So anyone, any personal individuals or corporations or anyone else can come in afterwards or come in anytime they want and download our code, download even all of our designs for like our CAD drawings for all our homes.
And everything we're building is going up on our GitHub. We're probably going to move it somewhere else eventually.
But for now, because GitHub is not the ideal place for CAD drawings, but we're starting there.
We just threw it all up in a hurry this week. So it's all there now. You can all download it for archival purposes if you like.
So yeah, we're really want to call out the community and see who can contribute, who's excited about this, who would like to contribute in some different ways.
Help us with hacking 3D printers, like large scale 3D printers to be able to print.
We would like to be able to, within a year, we would like to be able to 3D print an entire floating home in like a long weekend.
We think it's possible. We have some ideas on how to do it, but we need some help figuring it out.
Because we have the hardware, but we don't all have the software and things to make it up and figuring out what all the materials are going to be.
There's some really cool IoT. We love some really cool IoT projects, home automation projects, hydroponics.
We have some really kick-ass hydroponics things we're doing, 3D printed coral gardens, aquatic transport drones.
So yeah, there's a lot of things here that are really exciting.
So I hope you guys got to answer most of your questions.
Chris Nichols is typing another question.
So I'll be around on and off for the next couple hours, and then I'm going to have dinner and then I'll be back around.
So I'll be available to answer questions. Try to put them on the Seasteading chat channel, so I make sure I see them right away and it's easiest for me to find them.
And you can get in touch with us. My email is grant.oceanbuilders.com.
It's grant.oceanbuilders.com.
So yeah, please go and sign up for our challenges.
Tell us what you're interested in participating in.
We'll send out more information on the challenge that we're going to be doing.
And I suppose we'll be coordinated with Hack the Sea organizers as well to get all that information out.
And I'll see you there.
So I guess that's the end.