Roko puts self on ice floe, saving us the trouble

Environmentalists are fond of saying that “There is no second Earth“. They are wrong! Here’s why:

There is an entire second Earth right here on Earth.

Second Earth is a waterworld. It’s the vast Pacific Ocean that covers half the planet.

Well, he's a little fuzzy on the concepts of halves and wholes, but let's hear him out on colossal geoengineering projects.

the sequel to time cube, ice cube
- You've tried cubes of time, but have you tried cubes of time, on ice?

See what’s really fun here is that once again the libertarians are blissfully unaware of their natural predator: bears.

This is so funny. Every time they are given what they want the infrastructure crumbles to the point of being dangerous, and then the bears come to finish them off. Just ordinary bears are deadly enough for libertarians to LARP a Jurassic Park speedrun.
- I guarantee that if there is a libertarian space colony, all of their life support systems will be contaminated by mutant tardigrades (aka water bears). The libertarians yearn for destruction by bears.

ah yes so he's up to making ~~aircraft carrier~~ ~~floating libertarian treehouse~~ rube goldberg mad max platform out of pykrete

One idea for the bottom of the iceberg is to erect a grid of airtight barriers on the bottom of the berg, with cells a few dozen meters wide and a few meters tall and blow air bubbles into them

this makes this grid having to support several tons of buoyancy force, it will have to be airtight but also its connection to ice will have to be so, and ice will probably deform over time. did all of these motherfuckers dropped out of middle school?

look, i think it's up to all of us to have the imagination and foresight to support roko in this fabulous and important endeavour. we could lure patri friedman onto the same ice floe, for example, by the simple expedient of putting up a yellow and black flag with "no steppy on snek"
- It would give the orcas an opportunity to do the funniest possible thing
- nah, he'll never get there
  
  all he can possibly do is to beg for money from givewell or whatever it's called, then release a shitcoin to fund it, run a few prediction markets and hopefully at some point money cops will catch him
it will have to be airtight but also its connection to ice will have to be so

just flex tape it bro why you so negative
As Tom and Ray would say (rest in peace), it's too much course 8.

(Course 8 is the catalog number for the physics department at MIT.)
Besides, it's been then tried already: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Habakkuk

There is an entire second Earth right here on Earth.

"... Mister Bond."

"I sunk your battleship thirty-five minutes ago."

i like how he started on the premise that iceberg is cheap real estate, then okay let's cover underside with thermal insulation, and also reinforce top with freshwater ice, that freshwater will be have to be transported there and then frozen in place, and also let's cover top with expanded glass and concrete, and let's put wood pulp and basalt fiber rebar in ice, and

all while never counting beans, and any and all numbers are entirely pulled out of his ass

even on lesswrong the guy going through his numbers for how concrete behaves
- Roko even said the 'I think agricultural waste products like straw can be substituted for sawdust so maybe you are paid to take it off their hands.[emph mine]' line. which is always a good sign when somebody is trying to the economically feasible math.
Just program the godlike AI to turn everything into pykrete instead of paperclips.

Problem solved.

This is literally the dumbest shit I've read all week and it's been a pretty dumb week. I'm afraid I have to diagnose Roko with having the brain scamblies. There is no cure.

Yes, we've had vertical cities with economic class strata, but have we had frigid vertical cities with economic class strata? This is an incredible innovation in the dystopian novel genre.

@barsquid Ahem: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Rise_(novel)

(I did NOT expect to learn that Roko is ripping off J. G. Ballard for ideas.)
- N = 2 (this and judge dredd) right now, but was there a rise in fiction in the 70's/80's where they did the 'people live their whole lives in a skyscraper and didn't come out' thing? Is there some underlying societal fear I'm not super aware of? Or am I making too much of two examples?
- also, to some extent, poul anderson's war of the wing-men.
Welcome to Alcor Towers.

Ok, seriously, this is just Mortal Engines fan-fiction in an oceanpunk AU.

No, see that would be way cooler than this.

extremely funny that none of his interlocutors bother asking what his engineering background is

Don't worry Roko has the support of the best mind of our generation behind him: Roko: "Elon is absolutely right that Tunnels[sic] would solve traffic"

E: More on the best minds, somebody in the comments : "'it[a country selling their land to a new country] has happened' is far less rare than CREATING the land, which has never happened.". Are we a joke to you? [this sentence was translated from Dutch].
careful with questions about formal education like this, you might offend Dear Leader

Look, I already knew Roko was a moron but this is outrageous.

Yes, good plan, the ozone layer hole craves more skin cancer sacrifices. (And don't forget that hole is prob going to grow due to mega genius musk putting aluminum sats in the sky that burn up in high altitude)

Amusing also that nobody mentions piracy.

He does mention that you'll need a military to defend your borders, though of course he's more concerned about opportunistic "legacy governments" taking his iceborne super country away from him rather than pirates showing up to fish anything valuable out of the sea as it all predictably and rapidly falls apart.
- Yeah this new 'military' setup will also quicly lead to them being seen as pirates by 'legacy governments' (who tend to love armed groups showing up, esp near any shipping lanes (if he wants to live anywhere away from the damaged ozone layer (the south of the south pacific seems somewhat empty at least). And the various groups of people in this new libertarian utopia (I'm going to assume it is libertarian) will surely not start preying on each other, or those nice 'legacy' shipping going round. At least 4 people will call themselves Ragnar Danneskjöld.
Yes, good plan, the ozone layer hole craves more skin cancer sacrifices.

Sun can't get you if you never go outside taps noggin
- Ha, do you think The Hole didn't think of that? It consumes!

by the way, when was the last time when rats got their lives or limbs in danger by testing their stupid ideas? instead of, you know, asking someone who knows beforehand? probably something weird happened to people testing these anti-cavity bacteria, but nothing really serious i guess. that was maybe half year ago or so

Someone send Roko a copy of James K. Morrow's novel "Towing Jehovah" which involves the enormous corpse of God being towed, by a (much smaller) oil tanker, from near the Equator north to a fijord for burial in a cave. (I lost interest toward the end).

It's not strictly relevant - I don't think the crew sets up on the corpse itself - but it'd be fun to watch where Roko's head goes.

"Step One: We kill God. Step Two: We harvest the cadaver, plastinate it, and build our city."

“Step One: We kill God

I'm in for that. He can do with the corpse whatever he wants after, as long as I don't have to see it.

Roko is of course begging the question, and the premise he is wrong about is that there is a sizable population willing to relocate to a floating iceberg, instead of living in an existing country.

Consider what the proposed citizens have to consent to:

paying for the R&D required to implement the technical solutions Roko envisions, along with the continued higher maintenance costs
paying higher wages for the people who are supposed to do all the boring menial jobs in this floating city, on par with existing cities
paying higher daily cost of living for everything from food to building supplies to luxuries to entertainment that have to be imported
being at the mercy of "legacy governments", many of whom possess navies capable of everything from interdicting the food supply, to literally undermining the city from below, to actual assaults and airstrikes
paying higher prices for insurance of their lives and dwellings and possessions because of all the above

Amusingly the solution for a libertarian city is a megastructure project probably only a rich nation is prepared to pay for.

On the other hand, no age of consent laws
- Roko: I'm in.

@dgerard Seasteading 2.0 - with even *more* shit than version 1.0!