Open Sailing - International Ocean Station

[WildMage]

Some really awesome mashups of available technologies:

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Open Sailing - International Ocean Station, Social Responsive Interface, from 2008


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o3IS94Z2RZw

Open_Sailing is an international community trying to develop the International_Ocean_Station as an open-source project, developing hardware and software to enable intelligent human activities at sea. The project started as an apocalyptic design response unit, but has evolved into a voluntary exploration community of passionate amateurs, inventors and scientists. We believe that in a matter of months and with a modest budget, we can challenge the civilization symbol of the International Space Station that produces today semi-secret data, that costs more than 150 billion $ to tax payers and was developed over decades by a closed group of rocket scientists. We can do it. It is not a utopian project we are working on it everyday.


Open_Sailing is divided into several labs investigating novel technologies :
- Instinctive_Architecture : an architecture that behaves like a super-organism, reacting to the weather conditions and other variables, reconfiguring itself.
- Energy_Animal : an independent module that generates energy from the waves, wind and sun, providing continuously off-grid energy and being a node for environment and data mesh networking.
- Nomadic_Ecosystem : engineering a mobile aquaculture to sustain human long term life at sea.
- Openet.org : forum to formulate a global standard for a purely civilian internet, an internet moderated by its users, not by the governments nor the industries nor the militaries.
- Life_Cable : a simpler unified standard for energy, water, waste, information in a complex built structure.
- Swarm_Operating_System : a customizable decision assisting software, using real-time data about global threats or personal interests.
- Ocean_Cookbook : making the experience at sea not of a survival quality but a truly yummy experience.
- Open_Politics : think tank about a possible internal organization for a new oceanic urban structure.
More info: http://opensailing.net
http://international-ocean-station.org
http://energyanimal.org
http://lifecable.org

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Open_Sailing community and this website are no longer active (as of July 2014). This website is an archive of the community's work and is not up to date.
A few former Open_Sailing members are now working on Protei, the Open Hardware Shape Shifting Sailing Robot. http://www.protei.org


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Open_Sailing Presentation at ARS Electronica 2009


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

Presented by Cesar Harada (http://cesarharada.com) and Hiromi Ozaki (http://sputniko.com) in Ars Electronica 2009, Linz, Austria.
Open Sailing is an open-source, globally coordinated community of about 50 people that aims to design a new platform to overcome any possible natural or man-made disaster, stimulating peoples ingenuity and sense of solidarity: an open architecture, a drifting village of solid and comfortable shelters surrounded
by flexible ocean-farming units.
The ultimate mission of Open Sailing is to take on challenges like overpopulation, climate change and energy conflicts with do-it-yourself technologies: Instinctive_Architecture, Energy_Animal and Life_Cable are some of the new approaches that are being developed and tested. The collective making of the International Ocean Station is our first community fostering objective.

[whoknows]

LOL the wave of the future!

I love the concept, though there will be huge technological challenges...

[majicbar]

While many, or most, may call this Utopian in nature, it actually offers the ability to test libertarian principals and various technological applications that will be models for living in space and in colonization of the planets and moons in the Solar System. If successful it will also challenge nations the World over to emulate the model it presents to reform our current World order.

[WildMage]

LOL the wave of the future!

I love the concept, though there will be huge technological challenges...

What is cool about their approach, is they are looking at the older ways of doing things. Seeking age old techniques, which have been proven to work without the aide of modern technology. So it becomes much more feasible, because it does not rely on modern components. The overall system working as a floating symbiotic perma-culture of sorts becomes the technology.

[WildMage]

While many, or most, may call this Utopian in nature, it actually offers the ability to test libertarian principals and various technological applications that will be models for living in space and in colonization of the planets and moons in the Solar System. If successful it will also challenge nations the World over to emulate the model it presents to reform our current World order.

That is an interesting twist, and quite valid considering we cannot sustain a population at sea with an abundance of resources already present, we may not be ready to colonize space. Although the Navies do sustain what could be considered small towns at sea, it is only thru massive logistics efforts, and far from self-sustaining. Many many years ago I had a discussion with a friend on this subject. One of the solutions was floating iceberg type vessels, where most of the living quarters and such was beneath the water line. Mainly to provide a stable platform, another aspect was the interconnected pieces would work to be like a slinky, flexible and free form as it expanded outward, but becoming more rigid as they contracted back onto themselves.

*WM*