It’s more of an ecological community…the people in these pods, the barnacles and other sea life that grow on them, the fish that shelter among them, the predators that feed on those or on people who fall in, and so on.
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Take this and multiply it by a million and you have a vision of what a Mars colony run by techbros would be. In the end, you die, she dies, everybody dies, because any possible rescue is at least 18 months away.
The bit about “I guess we should tend the gardens.” reminds me of the Jamestown colony, and “The hungry time.” Puts a whole new image on the sort of people that lit out for the New World.
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Quite eloquent. Thank you!
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Ah, but this time, it will be different. They mined Iron Pyrite, but we’ll mine Ethereum.
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Are you saying that you can’t get lazy and rely on a protective layer of barnacles like the smokers did with their tanker in Water World?
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The reporter nailed how stupid that render is with the simple question, “how do I get a pint of milk?” The clueless answer was literally, “I dunno, maybe a drone?”. A perfect example of how they spent millions of dollars on this boondoggle yet haven’t thought it through at all.
These people really don’t deserve to be rich. Textbook white men failing upwards.
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All the downsides of “tiny house” living with none of the upsides, like low cost of maintenance or being able to take a step outside.
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Yeah, even Alcatraz had some outdoor areas and green space. These are just awful. Not even an obvious way to dock a boat to one.
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Stuck in a modernist egg-tomb suspended over open ocean. It’s like some one designed a level of hell for a travel magazine editorial.
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He kept a woman as a personal sex slave. Sally Hemmings wasn’t a mistress. She was his personal property. The only benevolent slaveowners are dead ones.
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haha! I use that one a lot.
even got the mum saying it these days!
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So much this. I’m constantly amazed by how few tech bros, modern urbanites and Hollywood writers have any idea how much maintenance machinery requires. The built up world falls apart immediately the moment we stop expertly maintaining it. For example, it’s a trope in movies that people find cars that have been sitting for decades, fire them up and drive away. Never mind all the seals would be rotted, gasoline goes bad, batteries go dead, and everything rusts solid in pretty short order after the oil is gone.
Steel ships in salt water are that decay on hyper speed. It takes massive, constant human effort to keep them afloat at all. The notion that these clowns think you can buy a 25yo ship, park it, and it will just work is a mind-blowing lack of any practical real world experience with anything.
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Nah, it’ll be fine. They’re a whole 3 meters above water and, as we all know, ocean waves never get above 2.9 meters high.
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Even mechanically simple infrastructure like plumbing.
These guys have spent so much time patting themselves on the back for inventing new ways to push ones and zeroes around that they’ve forgotten how much of modern civilization depends on moving in clean drinking water, moving out poop, and making sure those two things never mix.
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What’s amazing to me is that even faced with the realization that there’s all sorts of issues that need understanding and problems that need addressing, the focus is entirely on the most immediate step necessary to get forward movement, only to get blind-sided by the next huge issue that wasn’t being addressed out of ignorance, that immediately comes up.
I’m waiting for one of these dudes to get far enough along the process where a ship gets wiped out by bad weather or they encounter pirates, or some other distress that requires the intervention of a country’s coast guard/navy. It’ll be “Sealand” all over again.
I can’t get over the disparity between the fantasy - a giant ship permanently parked in international waters as a home - and the reality of cruise ships in particular - a floating hotel intended for short-term stays that requires a large staff and extensive maintenance between those stays and regular visits to dry dock, during which time no one can be on the ship. It’s like they hadn’t thought about what a cruise ship is beyond, “place I go that sits in the water, where everything is magically taken care of until I disembark.” If they thought about the crew and expenses, they assumed, presumably, they wouldn’t be needed because the people living there would do everything for themselves - not even considering cruise ships are designed such that passengers can’t do anything for themselves (even for the things they actually know how to do).
I can’t get over how supremely dumb the “seapods” are, in every respect. I mean, to start with, either they’re in international waters (hello pirates!), which means they’re in deep ocean, which means they can’t be anchored to anything, but have to be floating (so… they’d have to be boats). If they’re in some country’s territorial waters, the inhabitants are subject to their laws, so you might as well be on land.
These are like an attempt to create a weird gated community, and apparently they treat it that way, not considering the million practical issues that potentially could put any inhabitants in mortal danger. Seems like what these people really should be aiming to build is their own gated community with extra-high walls, fire-filled moats and machine gun turrets to keep everyone else out. It’d be cheaper and more practical, if nothing else.
It really is totally amazing to me how even the most surface-level issues haven’t remotely been considered. This is a fantasy for them, where reality has no place in the considerations, but it’s also like a child’s fantasy, where they’re used to having everything done for them, and aren’t really aware of it. “I’m going to run away!” “How are you going to get food?” “That’s not a problem, mommy will give it to me.” I mean, these people must rely entirely on restaurant meals, Soylent and/or partners doing all the domestic work to be this clueless. If they haven’t considered something as basic as food, of course they haven’t thought about maintenance issues.
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With a few extra downsides added in.
“These would be individual floating homes held 3 metres above the water…”
Remind me again, how high do rogue waves and storm surges get?
“… by a single column and a tripod-shaped base beneath the ocean.”
And tripod bases are famously stable. (/s) There’s a reason your office chair has five legs, not three.
Oil drilling rigs pull up stakes and move out of the path of hurricanes. I wonder what the plan is for SeaPods.
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People seem to forget: the ocean is a barren and unforgiving desert. With hurricanes. It isn’t a bountiful paradise where one only has to drop a fishhook to survive.
The only scenario I can think of that would lead to “and they all died miserably” quicker is Libertarian Techbros…IN SPACE!
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Depending on how far into the launch sequence you start, that could likely be a movie in real time.
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Classic example of how libertarians focus almost exclusively on so-called “Negative Liberty” (i.e., freedom from interference by other people or governments) while giving almost no consideration to “Positive Liberty” (i.e., access to the power and resources required to pursue meaningful options).
Just because you’re beyond the reach of government doesn’t mean you’re “free.” Those pod houses look like some kind of sci-fi supermax prison.
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I always liked this paragraph from Lore Sjoberg on that:
“Your ideas on how to bring peace to the planet are stupid and wrong.”
So you were in the Gifted and Talented Education program. So was practically every other saliva-pot with a domain name and a text editor. For that matter, so was the guy next door who believes that Mars is made of styrofoam. The world is not waiting for your revealed truth. Crime, war, prejudice, and hate have not been hanging around all these millenia waiting for your mom to forget her pill so that you can eradicate them. Complex problems don’t have simple solutions. Any five-paragraph essay that claims to be able to end any problem that’s been around for more than three years has no more worth than a program that fills the screen with the sentence “I TOOK MY PARENTS’ PRAISE TOO SERIOUSLY.”
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