“Diving Deep: Daredevil Sets World Record for Surviving Months Underwater—Is Ocean Living the Future?”
In Grant’s case, he’d long felt the drive to live on the water. Before founding Ocean Builders, he lived in a floating home in a marina in Toronto. The lifestyle speaks to him on a spiritual level.
SeaPods appeal to a variety of customers, from those looking to escape government authority to artists and musicians looking for an inspiring environment
Image credits: Grant Romundt from Ocean Builders
Image credits: Grant Romundt from Ocean Builders
But for Rudy, Ocean Builders is all about creating the future. To some extent, his SeaPods are about environmentalism. He was once quoted by the Seasteading Institute as saying: “Building on land destroys habitats. Building on the ocean creates habitats. You can’t be an environmentalist if you live on land.”
With the Deepwater Model, the inventor sees himself as one step closer to creating floating cities, which he insists will be even more important in the future due to rising sea levels. Much of his time—while setting the record—has been devoted to bringing about this future. For example, he’s been working on developing an AI that could control mobile robots capable of maintaining and repairing the SeaPods so that the residents don’t need any specialized technical expertise.
“We will be able to provide robots that can actually walk about the house like bipedal robots,” he said. He hopes to have this AI system up in a couple of years.
For Rüdiger Koch, SeaPods are just a stepping stone to space travel—floating cities are necessary to build the futuristic launch loop
Image credits: Grant Romundt from Ocean Builders (Render Image)
However, even floating cities aren’t Rudy’s end goal. His sights are set on the stars. An aerospace engineer, he only came to co-found Ocean Builders due to his interest in the launch loop, a means of reaching space without rockets. Imagine a giant hula hoop standing upright on the surface of the Earth with the top part in space. Inside the hoop, a maglev train goes around and around at such blistering speeds that, when timed correctly, the centrifugal force can fling a payload into space.
