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World’s Largest Cargo Sailboat Completes Historic First Atlantic Crossing
(www.marineinsight.com)
this post was submitted on 09 Nov 2025
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Nice, though I wonder about reliability of this thing, as well as capital costs. In any case, an auxiliary motor is a must, and good thing they have that too.
We did without auxiliary motors for a long time. The only reason a motor would be needed is if everyone is too greedy to pay for the work to be done right (having a big enough crew for rowing).
But the crew can't stop the world from being greedy, so it makes sense that they're using sails and a motor to improve on what they can.
I'm pretty sure rowboats are absolutely not viable for moving thousands of tons of cargo. Also, they existed because there was a huge supply of slave labor.
That's not to mention the larger crew doing hard manual labor would require much more food, which is a sort of fuel in itself, one that is not commonly produced in an environmentally sustainable way.
Electric motor seems to be the superior option all-round (except for energy density in storage, where diesel still reigns supreme by a large margin)
I'm absolutely positive they've done exactly that.
Probably not one boat at a time, but I'd rate the importance of reducing the required number of boats as "less than low, a simple zero" and the importance of a breathable atmosphere as "extremely high."
And now there's a bigger supply of slave labor than ever. Our owners have never been so far from needing more of us; so focused on killing us off and finding ways to do things without us, for such a long time. It's nothing new to see a war engineered to kill off a few million slaves when there's overstock, but it's unprecedented to see stuff like chat bots deployed to drastically reduce the number needed worldwide.
Irrelevant. I didn't say "use bad methods to grow food and fuel the crew with that." Why would that be my point? If I suggest avoiding the use of motors because they're deadly and stupid, isn't it obvious I'd also suggest avoiding agriculture methods that are deadly and stupid?
Or are you saying one good choice is the maximum suggestion you'll entertain, and if I can't suggest one good choice that ensures survival on its own, you'd rather just die than move on to second or third or more considerations of what mentally healthy humans would do?
Never on a historical scale we moved so much cargo. Long-range ships were primarily used to move something extremely valuable, such as spices and gold - and now we have ships hauling everything because it's so much more efficient than anything else.
And so the solution is, instead of reducing work week and expanding social programs, to crank people up in dangerous conditions and make them do one of the hardest and most avoidable jobs known to humanity?
Fair, but it follows. Nowadays, in the age of cheap solar and new, eco-friendly power storage options, it is much, much easier and cheaper to add an electric engine than to maintain a fleet of wage-slaves fed by agricultural surplus.
Your kind of "solution" is both economically inefficient and inhumane, and doesn't seem to get out of the box of "9-to-5 to everyone by all means". So, don't rush to accuse me of shortsightedness.
You're wasting your time arguing with a pigeon.
It's honestly one of the funniest threads I've read in a while.
Did you get to this part?
Like they're gonna have a fleet of oceangoing cargo ships, each towed by a massive team of willing humans, all while escaping the dastardly pirates and their motorboats.
It's like Mad Max and Waterworld had a beautiful, insane baby
Yeah definitely a troll. Probably AI-written unless they're really dedicated.
I like this part:
We also have legs, so I want to see their take on trains and how powering them with human-sized hamster wheels is better for "safety" and "efficiency"
Cargo planes in their world should be really interesting
Fair!
Though I had a bit of fun around the absurdity of their argument. Quickly went downhill though.
You said "thousands of tons." I guarantee sails and rowboats have moved thousands of tons over the years. I'd even bet sails and rowboats move thousands of tons every year.
No, we have ships hauling everything because the gene pool has been taken over by lazy idiots.
If you think some number of your life-years would be a smaller price to pay for a shipment than some number of your dollars, it's not that you're an economic genius or a master of efficiency.
If you're just using oil because it's a convenient way to "save dollars," without even realizing pollution impacts survival, that is again not a mastery of efficiency.
Why are you using a strawman argument in a place where I could get banned for an angry reply?
Rhetorical question, obviously.
Also, why is your strawman argument so ridiculous instead of trying to sound more like what I said?
Maybe you should read before replying.
I see no evidence of that at all. It seems like we have found a lot of safe ways to grow food and not really any safe ways to mass-produce solar panels or motors. What's your basis for what you're saying?
Neither, actually
Incorrect again, and how? You think sailing is a 9-to-5? There are so many layers of you being obviously wrong, I don't get how you typed this and didn't notice
There's no rush, but you are obviously shortsighted, and you strayed pretty deep into bad-faith discussion with this reply.
Thousands of tons on a single vessel. The reason we have such huge container ships is that while the surface area and subsequent water resistance gets squared, the volume growth is cubic.
This means the larger the vessel, the more energy efficient it is at delivering anything from point A to point B. This is exactly how shipping has become the most efficient way to deliver goods.
If you want to deliver the same amount of cargo by many smaller ships, you'll need way, waaaaaay more energy to do so. This is incredibly inefficient, and ships of the past were of that scale exclusively due to structural limitations. Hence, shipping costs were incredibly high, leading to only the most expensive items being transported.
Now, rowboats cannot technically be wide, because otherwise you won't be able to seat enough rowers to drive the ship. And they cannot technically be too long, or else, being narrow, they will be turned over or broken in a storm. So, they are forced to be small.
I answered you right there - you can use electricity generated through renewables instead of heavy human labor. Sodium ion batteries for smaller missions (like ports in Asia), green hydrogen for longer hauls (like China-US), and nuclear for particularly long hauls through complicated areas (like the Northern Sea Route).
I re-read your comment again. You claim we're all wage slaves anyway and it's better to row a cargo ship until people in power decide to rather throw us into war. You also mentioned that it's either rowboats or ecological collapse. Did I get it right, or did you mean something else entirely?
Studies on the issues of modern agriculture and recent developments in renewable energy tech. We do have safe ways to grow food, indeed, but they require much higher level of investment and do not pay off very well, while renewables are already cheaper than their traditional counterparts, naturally leading to massive rollout. We just need to keep going with this.
Obviously not as in "9 hours a day, 5 day a week job". It's more of a cultural reference to the current work time conditions. If there are too many workers and too little job, maybe the best course of action is reducing work time and redistributing gains made through automation?
This way people won't need to do useless jobs like rowing a boat in the era of electric propulsion, and will have more time for themselves.
By no means. I was genuinely engaged with the conversation, but it just so happens that the point of your argument completely misses me. There are obviously better ways to do what you propose, and I fail to see the merits of going back to rowing as means of ship propulsion.
Rowboats cannot be big, hence they fail to reap physical benefits that come with larger ship sizes, which alone makes them so incredibly inefficient; they require intense manual labor and overblown crew, raising costs and reducing useful load, and they offer a very grim picture of the future full of pointless jobs instead of worker liberation.
So...why rowing, of all things?
Which I responded to. Copying and pasting:
Probably not one boat at a time, but I’d rate the importance of reducing the required number of boats as “less than low, a simple zero” and the importance of a breathable atmosphere as “extremely high.”
Nope. It gets harder to build ships beyond a certain size, so our ships actually aren't infinitely large, they're at a size limited by construction difficulty.
Also, our biggest ships use crude oil, and I hear we've never really found a way to make sails work for ships that size, so it seems like our ships have actually gone bigger than the most efficient size.
I don't get what you mean. Most efficient in what list? What are the other ways? I guess you could define "shipping" in a way that excludes couriers carrying single items at a time, but what does that have to do with cargo ship size?
Were you trying to say crude-oil-based cargo ships are an efficient way to deliver goods? They're not, unless anti-natalism is objectively correct, which I don't think it is.
And?
If that's "incredibly inefficient," what adjective do you use for the inefficiency of misusing crude oil?
Again, ships today are still not infinitely large, they are limited in scale by "structural limitations" (more like construction method limitations but whatever)
And there was a time in the past when the biggest ships were the size the biggest ships should be today, instead of bigger
No idea what you're trying to say with this part
If you had a secret method to make that happen overnight, I think you'd have lead with that isntead of making me ask how. I see 0% chance your next reply is gonna have instructions for what I should do to make it so all ships are electrified with pure renewables within 24 hours.
But OK, I'll bite. How?
But how? What is the method you secretly have involving these? Just saying their names doesn't give me any idea how to make all this happen so fast.
I'm glad you have no explanation for how to make this one happen, since what I want is a path away from extinction, instead of merely a different path towards it.
Terrible reading comprehension, but that's to be expected from such a dishonest person.
Maybe you should try reading again and again until you can handle telling the truth.
False dichotomy. I've meant what I said, and there's no reasoning for the idea that I meant what you made up, instead of what I've said.
Again, how?
0% chance you're secretly holding onto an answer until my next reply, and not just blindly saying false shit, but how do these "studies" show evidence your secret technique to electrify all cargo ships with renewables instantly is a better strategy than doing the best we can with publicly known stuff?
The reference makes no sense. It's as ridiculous at the metaphorical level as the literal level, and it seems like you're just adding the dumbest shit you can think of to waste my time and energy in a gish gallop at this point.
Are we suddenly randomly discussing a hypothetical where that's the only problem? And you're upholding you wrote this in good faith? Kinda funny, but moreso scary.
Sure, in a hypothetical where we had no other problems, but it's delusional and sick how you seem to be pretending this applies in the real world.
Yep, there's the part where you pretend this is you attempting good-faith discussion.
Why even lie at this point?
Nope.
That's why bad faith discussion is bad. You should try to understand things, instead of just lashing out when you don't understand something. You'd understand more that way.
What proposal, and what ways?
Again, not an excuse for bad faith. More of an example of why it's bad.
What the fuck is with this part? Scraping the bottom of the stupidity barrel for this gish gallop, huh?
I didn't ask if your threshold for "big" is bigger than you think a rowboat could ever be. I can use a dictionary and pick my own threshold for "big."
Are you trying to tell me there's something wrong with me for thinking "big" is a fair enough word for the biggest rowboats, or is there something I'm missing about why I should give a fuck how you use the word?
What?
Because we have arms. What the fuck kind of question is that?
I had to retype this entire reply because I accidentally clicked "reply" while copying that last sentence, and learned PieFed deletes any existing reply when that happens.
That made me very angry at your gish gallop, and yet somehow I'm probably the one at risk of being banned for being rightly angry at you.
If you have any fraction of a spine, either reply on nostr (where I can't be banned), or not at all.
So, essentially removing the single most important advantage of marine transportation (hyper-cheap global transportation due to tricking physics with large-scale ships) is nothing? May I remind you that 1 (one) container ship stuck in a Suez canal four years ago threatened to cause a global economic outage? Without extreme economic efficiency of large ships, the modern economy as we know it is about to collapse. This is not an exaggeration. You simply cannot maintain this level of trade and exchange with smaller ships, as most things will be prohibitively expensive to deliver over the long range.
Indeed, because, again, structural integrity and the requirement to pass through things like Suez and Panama canals. Overall, however, the bigger the ship - the better. And you cannot build any rowboat that would even remotely, on the same order of magnitude, match the efficiency of container ships.
You're writing this under an article about sail-powered vessel able to deliver 5300 tons of cargo.
Rowers would need to be seated on the sides of the ship, or need paddle systems (probably rotationary) large enough to have many rowers drive the same shaft. Either way, you're very limited in how much rowers you can put in there, and the wider the ship - the more you'll see it's simply not an option. Modern container ships are way wider than it makes sense to put rowers to.
Absolutely nothing can be done to achieve this - and it's equally impossible to turn every vessel into a rowboat in this time. What's the point? We have industry and technology to turn vessels into either, so why choose the inferior option?
Huh? Nuclear-powered vessels are traversing this route for many decades already, particularly the icebreakers, but really all sorts of crafts, even mobile nuclear power plants. And they have good track record as far as reliability and environmental impacts are concerned. Nuclear power is inferior to renewables in terms of ecological footprint, but stays way ahead of diesel and other chemical fuels. And in many applications, particularly in very remote areas with few ports and complicated navigation, they are the only sensible option anyway.
Yes, absolutely. The biggest rowboats are not big enough to even remotely match modern container ships, and this translates in a loss of efficiency - a very big one.
In the realm of shipbuilding, larger ships are more energy efficient per unit of cargo volume/weight. Aside from that, hosting a crew large enough to propel the ship would carve out a lot of space otherwise used for cargo. Finally, rowing a ship is a very tough but also unnecessary job, i.e. something people struggle with for no good reason.
You make it seem like it's either oil or rowing, or that we can turn any ship into a rowboat overnight. In fact, turning a container ship into a rowboat would require a much more complex and expensive rebuilding than installing an electric powertrain. There's really no merit to your idea at all, or at least I didn't hear a single one good argument for it - not because I don't care to listen, but because, with all my attention put into it, I see nothing but odd fantasy completely detached from physics.
I don't think it's worth it to keep this discussion in any capacity or on any platform. If anyone here bans you (which I doubt anyone will, unless you end up nagging everyone), it's not because you're a visionary beinging truth to stupid people. It's because it is you wasting people's time without reading a single physics book to have your grand ideas easily disproven, allowing you to move on to more productive choices.
With genuine hope that I didn't waste a couple dozen of minutes on some aggravating AI bot, goodbye.
I already called you out for rage baiting me on a platform with bans.
Do you have a link to the nostr copy of this reply, or did you expect me to read all that here?
Your ignorance would be you missing out, not me.
Besides, judging by your repeated claims that you'll get banned here, I must assume you to be a Nazi or other kind of supremacist. If that's the case, I strongly advise you to stock up on history and philosophy books before proceeding with physics. If it's not so - it's still your issue not reading it.
Cheers!
Not seeing a link here. Again, this platform has bans, making it an inappropriate place for you to rage bait me, and not a great place for me to read your replies after you've demonstrated your penchant for rage baiting.
You'll need engines for manoeuvering. Other ways are just painful and not as safe.
No. I'll need engines because I have too many enemies, and not enough supporters.
Rowing (or even getting out to swim and pull) is safer if you have enough people, because we can't safely make and power engines.
I want a boat bigger than I can row on my own, so I want a motor. But I wouldn't want much if I wasn't up against people that seem to use motorized stuff to derive an advantage while starting gunfights over food that isn't rightly theirs.
Now if only the green hydrogen was there already.
It is! But the extent to which it is used is limited by the efficiency losses that come with electrolysis, logistics, and reverse conversion.
I assume it could still be useful in applications that require long hauls, as dragging a heavy and expensive battery around can negate efficiency benefits over the long runs.