Seasteading
My original About Fiction States essay was written in 2018, updated in 2019 and at the end of that I invited people to join in with their ideas of how future governance could be configured. Since then, people have brought up the subject of seasteading and I’ve started to realise that colonising the oceans is a much better solution to the future society question that Fiction States ever could be.
The huge problem with Fiction States (the combination of existing nation states) is that the concept is hide-bound. A Fiction State can only happen if you take control of the land and assets which other people have built up and give yourself the right to govern and tax the people who already live there. This presents insurmountable problems in both property law and consent to rule, which of course means strong opposition, legal challenges and someone else’s regulatory system to pick through.
Now, let’s hop out of that very old box. I’ve recently read the book Seasteading: How Floating Nations Will Restore the Environment, Enrich the Poor, Cure the Sick, and Liberate Humanity from Politicians, by Joe Quirk, with Patri Friedman. I’ve watched the podcasts on Youtube and also read the first screenplay on the subject of seasteading. I don’t think any of these visionaries will mind if I tell you that the key ideas of the seasteading movement are these:
Vested interests — None.
Attempting a grand alternative society on land is almost impossible because vested interests will oppose it (the population, the politicians, monopoly businesses and the owners of assets you need to control), plus there’s overcoming the existing legal and regulatory framework. Attempting a grand alternative society on the sea involves none of these resisting factors because ownership does not exist beyond territorial limits. The problem is therefore one of engineering to mitigate natural forces, which humanity is advanced enough to solve.
Sea is 72% of the Earth’s surface and no one lives there except in a transient sense, so there’s nothing to prevent a new population gathering on water.
That doesn’t mean 72% of the planet’s surface is available for seasteading because there are zones around coastlines which are either designated as territorial waters (up to 12 miles) or are in the country’s area of regulatory interest or ‘exclusive economic zones’ (up to 200 miles), but that does leave about 50% of the planet’s surface as empty, habitable, almost unregulated surface space, or ‘international waters’, as established by the Convention of the High Seas in 1958.
If you are in international waters, that doesn’t mean you can do absolutely anything you like either because universally recognised criminal acts (think piracy, drugs) allow any nation to intervene under the doctrine of universal jurisdiction (see the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea). However, if the new society will follow the basic civilised standards, no one can invoke this convention to justify intervention against you.
Engineering — Already designed.
We have solved the engineering challenges already. Essentially, the habitation would be on a fluid environment and, to state the obvious, we can’t breathe water. So what does seasteading accommodation look like?
In coastal areas, (1) seastead housing pods, each on a stilt connected to the shallow sea floor, have been constructed in Panama this year by a company called Ocean Builders (https://ocean.builders/seapod/). The cost is equivalent to a standard family home in the US.
(2) Low-build 3D-printed housing modules [floating bungalows], individually or connected in mats, can float on placid waters or infill bays and harbours with even lower cost housing. These module homes can be moved, reconfigured and taken out for repair. They can be built of recycled plastic with honeycomb walls for buoyancy and heat retention, or silica, which lasts for 10,000 years and eventually returns to sand.
Those two options are not appropriate when you get out on the high seas where storms and wave height can be monumental, bouncing you around and potentially sweeping people away. The seas are less rough around the equator but assuming we aren’t going to restrict the possibilities to a narrow band (cold waters are better oxygenated and carry high stocks of fish species used for food), the options for deep, rough water are:
(3) platforms that rise out of the water on stilts, so tall waves pass underneath [oil rigs do this]; (4) tip-ships, which are apparently very stable, especially if a few are connected, which also makes upgrading to a platform deck possible. Imagine a long, cylindrical vessel, like a baseball bat, being towed out to sea and then flooded at the thick end, so it stands up in the water. The habitation is at the top and the waves wash past it without much movement; and (5) a combination of two, i.e. a mat of housing modules that people can live in when the conditions are fair, then a stilt-like rig in which they can shelter from stormy conditions.
Sustainability
Two thirds of the world’s fresh water is needed for agriculture and we are running out of water, but aquaculture (farming the sea) requires no fresh water to produce food. This is the only way to scale-up agricultural food production without water shortages for people, which looked inevitable if the human population continues to go up. Food can also be exported from the sea to the land.
The analogue from the Seasteading book (Joe Quirk) is that when we were nomadic hunter-gatherers, the land could only support a very small population. When we switched to farming and intensively managed food, we became able to feed seven billion people on land. However, we have always continued to be hunter gatherers on the oceans. Why? Perhaps because that’s how it has always been done, which is not a good reason for us not to improve it.
People can set up seaweed farms at sea now (for food and biofuels), but why don’t we farm fish on the high seas? After all, when their droppings sink to the floor of the deep ocean, that locks away carbon from the carbon cycle for up to ten million years and can reduce the impact of climate change. The reason why we don’t is because there’s no incentive to invest in livestock that can run away and be collected legally by other people. However, this problem has also been solved because an engineer has developed large Kevlar cages in the shape of the C60 molecule (the Bucky Ball), like underwater cathedrals, which can house fish and symbiotic ecosystems [seaweed, crustaceans to remove parasites] and which can float around with the seasteads.
Social care — online registration, then take it with you
Refer to the closing section of the Fiction States essay, where I describe a health and welfare pay-in safety net system that people can opt-into no matter where they live on the planet, from which money can be drawn for treatment and services anywhere in the world.
Governance
Imagine a democracy where every citizen has opted-in. Now imagine multiple democracies of this kind, where the best of them attract citizens from the other, less optimal systems because seasteads are modular and can detach and attach elsewhere on more preferable ‘island states’. As with biology, this mobility selects in favour of the best systems with the most attractive styles of governance. There is a major disincentive for a leader to act badly because his or her population will simply move away, which deletes all of the bad leader’s power.
Get involved
If you want to plan a new and improved society for human habitation, either as a thought exercise or for real, you will have to integrate the classic disciplines of engineering (durable and safe), economics (incentive) and philosophy (the dream, fairness), or your effort will fail; no exceptions. A new society should appeal to people’s natural needs and not pressure them. People like me (leaning toward philosophical input) see critical problems that engineers and economists don’t, and vice versa. A debate opens the subject up and can bring in the variety of expertise needed, as no individual can possibly have a full set of answers. Contact me, contact the authors of the Seasteading book, but if you are interested don’t let this possible future slip because it is already workable.
That’s my bit. Now it’s up to you. Remember though, the clock is ticking because sea-level is rising at around an average of 5mm per year, the global population is rising, energy consumption is rising, water and food supply levels are static. This is a good answer to many problems so it would be sensible to not wait twenty years before setting up habitation offshore.
