Oh yea, the sea floor was mentioned as the expected "hardest to get to" location, not as an exclusive. I would love to hear what everyone else thinks about creating reefs specifically to replenish the fish populations.If you'll allow other than ocean floor, what about ocean thermal conversion on a massive scale?Gigantic oil rig-like structures, first near shore off Puerto Rico, the Yucatan, New Guinea, maybe Ethiopia & Brazil, then in mid-ocean. Add wind farms offshore & (to deliver the power) relay satellites. The "harvest"? Energy, fresh water, kelp...plus ocean research and tourism $$.
OTOH, there's mining of the ocean floor manganese nodules... Beyond that, I'm not sure what you can "harvest" on the continental shelf.
From both, you're going to get big investment & development of minisubs , & hard diving suits (akin to JIM suits), for research & tourists--just for starters.
I wonder why 4 km was their target depth?
I am wondering what we could do now with wave generators covering a square mile of ocean surface, or tide generators up and down the coasts.
For me the oddity is that as anyone whose spent a lot of time on a ship will tell you, being on the ocean is a tale of the many tasks you will do, promptly, exactly when the expert in one of many subsets tell you to do them, or everybody dies. More than that, everyone has to keep ready to react, quickly and without hesitation, to an emergency that could happen at any moment. It's the quintessential "everyone is in this together" environment, because if it isn't, everyone one might die.
Anyone who's spent a ton of time around the college kids who make up some of the most enthusiastic proponents of seasteading will see the disconnect here almost immediately.
My friend is interested in the idea although luckily his wife very much is not (much more level headed, non libertarian that she is). It really is rather odd.
The idea of sea steading is pretty much a lifestyle of very small communities with strong views that require massive resources in order to survive. Whilst being vulnerable to outsiders.
My ulterior motives are now revealed, lol. I think that if we want to establish 'space colonies', then they are going to be existing in a hostile enviroment, far from help in case (rather, WHEN) things go wrong. OTOH, with the recent Japanese discoveries of rare earth ores 'north of the Hawiiaian Islands', I could see that we could soon indeed be having the economic incentive to establish deep sea facilities.Don't get me wrong, I think that it will become sustainable at some point, I just don't see that it is at present. All of the things one would need to make a small community of humans viable without constant contact or support from nearby land exist in concept, but they don't seem practical or affordable right now. So it is a bit like a space colony in some ways. It will be doable but so impractical that one would need to devote billions to it and still be firmly anchored to a nearby landmass.
Independence it would not be.
If I was into this general philosophy I would buy/settle an island in a place far away from the relevant central government, or other places, where supervision is likely to be light if just for practical reasons. At least if one is on land a lot of the hard technical issues can be removed.
The problem is that these islands are often pretty inhospitable. NZ for one has a few far - off islands that no one cares about. Although they'd be off limits for conservation reasons now. But 30 years ago? Maybe not