What is Seasteading and why is it necessary?
“I long to go down to the sea again, to the lonely sea and the sky, and all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by.”
Those were the words of John Masefield, the literary heavyweight who romanticised love for the ocean. Seldom it is mentioned that he deserted his ship in New York City as he felt safer working in a carpet factory.
The internationally agreed rules with which we have to work are these: Typically, land-based countries have territorial waters which extend to 12 nautical miles from their coast’s low water mark (some countries close together share waters). However, countries may also claim and control the seas up to the limit of their Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ), which amounts to 200 nautical miles (230 miles) from the coastline. Beyond that is the high seas where, until recently, national governments have had no authority to apply laws or impose taxes. The high seas are a no man’s land, which can also be an opportunity to inhabit and invent a new framework of governance and legislation free from all the old shackles. However, this unregulated area might be removed soon because the UN and China have initiated their own grabs for legal control the high seas, more on this below in the Politics section.
Seasteading is about accommodation, enterprise, de-centralisation, economic sustainability, inventing a new system of government, and cherry-picking the best ideas for a legal framework and constitution (as if for a new country) from scratch. The major force promoting the seasteading movement and trying to found a framework in international law is The Seasteading Institute (Seasteading.org). Seasteading, in my subjective opinion, attracts two main groups of people: (a) Well-heeled and well-educated pioneers including architectural designers, political philosophers, engineers, mariners, aquaculturalists and hardworking young people who appreciate adventure and affordable housing [e.g. with economies of scale, a 3-D printed floating housing module printed from silica for a few thousand pounds], and (b) Libertarians who want minimal governance and to do things which are legislated against in their countries of origin (guns, drugs, polygamy, casinos, vice). There are third and fourth groups which will eventually find out about this and want to do it, but haven’t cottoned onto it yet, © Religions and cults, and (d) Lower cost offshore medical operations and prescription services.
Various designs have been put forward for floating accommodation, such as the deep sea oil rig on stilts (where waves pass under the structure), the vertical ‘baseball bat’ which keeps its stability in the waves (this can be floated out horizontally and then base-weighted to make it vertical) and also the modular or 3-D printed housing units which can be joined together alongside solar panel, farming and recreational space units to form a large mat (less suited for the deep sea but a good solution for coastal waters or plugging a natural bay with a new city). As the Seasteading Institute point out, modular design allows for a natural-selection effect to be brought to bear on new floating colonies, i.e. where different cities have different economic (small government/large government) or ideological and legal conventions, which probably means that the owners of the individual accommodation units can unlink and choose the system which they would prefer to be part of. This unregulation selects in favour of the best systems (most fit for purpose) as it quickly kills bad ideas for societies (the population will leave) and reinforces the best ideas for societies as their citizen numbers expand. Essentially, if you are born on land then you are in that country’s system of rules unless you find a way to opt-out. In seasteading that is reversed as you begin by choosing where to opt-in, the alternative being to found a new place yourself.
Hey, why does anything need to change about the way we live? Let’s open this discussion by talking about the core problems to which seasteading provides solutions. These are mainly human consumption and also the physical and abstract limitations imposed by geography and legislation.
People: The estimated human population of the planet in 2025 is 8.23 billion, building towards more than 10 billion by the 2080s. If, like Atlas, you lounge around the foundational base of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, all these people need land to live on, clean water, food and energy, which are finite resources within a closed biosphere such as ours. The cost of inhabiting land in outer space is too high, given our current propulsion technology, so it makes sense to find ways to accommodate everyone and the food generation systems to sustain them on Earth’s surface. This will avoid resource wars when human expansion reaches a tipping point.
Land: Only 28 percent of the Earth’s surface is land. Some of that is effectively uninhabited or very sparsely populated (beyond a couple of cities) due to extremes of temperature and remoteness, e.g. Antarctica, Australia, Canada, Russia, Mongolia and Namibia. By the 2080s, the Maldives, Kiribati, Tuvalu, Vanuatu and parts of the Marshall Islands will be completely submerged and Bangladesh, India and China will all face population displacement at scale due to the current measurable trend of 3–5mm pa sea-level rise. In case you hadn’t heard, this is happening because warming causes less snow to fall or settle beyond short periods and glacial ice/permafrost on land masses melts, inevitably to outflow to the sea (conversely, solid ice already displacing water that then changes state to liquid makes no difference to sea-level as its mass remains the same). Most of the planet’s inhabited land and the majority of its expensive property is situated on the coastline. You can establish a length for all of the planet’s coastline added together. Due to the rising seas, this coastline length figure shortens annually. If you have ever considered the large price difference between a 14- and a 12-inch pizza at the chip shop, downscaling a mere 2 inches in diameter loses 36 percent of the total area. Where is the most obvious piece of virgin territory that we could move into?
Water: Already, in several countries on Earth, cities import water every day on barges or in trucks (India, Caribbean, the Middle East) because too much has been removed from the rivers, lakes and ground (lowering the water table) — and then even more people arrived. In other places, placing dam infrastructure on rivers has cut the water supply to nations downstream. Now, put that in the context that 70 percent of fresh water that humans draw out of the natural environment is used for agriculture and only 3 percent is ingested by humans. Much of that water-guzzling agriculture is geared toward feeding livestock such as (primarily) cattle but also sheep, pigs and poultry. Let’s focus on the cattle feed, which expends somewhere between 24 to 30 percent of the fresh water used. The main commercially grown cattle feeds are grass, vetch, alfalfa and clover (also rice and grains in Japan). There are major cattle producers which only feed their livestock one species of plant. Is there a way to save this water and make it available for humans instead, other than all going vegetarian? Well, aquaculture has shown us that algae-based cattle food grown in salt water is a perfectly good cattle feed. It also requires ZERO fresh water to be produced. If cattle food is produced by communities and industries at sea, this frees up enough fresh water to expand the human population eightfold.
Food — The cost of producing meat and dairy products globally has been rising faster than the trend for inflation. These are things we don’t have to eat but many of us are accustomed to having in our diet. Meat and cheese becoming unaffordable is what the politicians refer to as ‘bloody stump syndrome’ — i.e. If you take away something the population have always enjoyed, the voters become enraged. That’s tantamount to removing a limb. If they have never had it, they will be completely passive about continuing without it. The ending of free milk for schoolchildren and a heating allowance for pensioners are historic policy examples of ‘bloody stump’ anger, even though most countries never provided them. Ending free health care in the UK would raise this by an order of magnitude. There are two types of high cost food that can enjoy economies of efficiency and scale if we adapt. The first, as discussed in the previous Water section, is growing animal food, which we don’t consume directly. However, we do consume fish. Joe Quirk’s book Seasteading goes into the following point in detail. Ask yourself, why don’t we invest in growing huge stocks of fish in the oceans? Well, that’s because your livestock can swim away and be caught by someone else. The best answer I have seen for this has been the use of a cathedral-sized cage made from Kevlar mesh and a metal scaffold frame, which contains a vast shoal of fish (and their ecosystem of seaweed, molluscs and cleaner fish), which has been situated in an ocean gyre. It circulates for a year or two in a predictable area without any propulsion system or permanent human presence, the fish are free of predation and their feed comes from the natural current. Infestation, such as the plague of sea lice found in coastal fish farms, is significantly lessened back to the wild background level because the water throughput and area of containment are very different. If you can invest in fish stock and see a good profit, more of these will be built until the economy of scale brings the retail price of fish down. No trawler needs to be sent out for a couple of weeks to try to locate fish because the owner will know exactly where they are, and none will escape collection, come harvesting time. There is also the environmental advantage that faecal remains from fish fall into the deep ocean and their carbon is removed with functional permanency from the atmospheric system, sequestered out of the way for tens of millions of years. This is the way we can get the most food efficiency from the ocean.
Politics: I don’t know about you, but in my experience politics and over-zealous legislation have a way to utterly block us from doing anything, especially human freedom and innovation. You may or may not agree but it seems obvious to me that our systems for national government were designed to be fit for purpose for the previous century, when it was all about the push and pull between the industrial owners and the workers. These are called legacy governments and they are good at stopping excesses by containing populations, not enabling them. There may be systems which are more fit for purpose for the modern era, or which future-proof us by design for the next era, which could well be an Artificial Intelligence age which abruptly ends the late Holocene. Now, along comes an idea like seasteading and the concept of populations moving from land to establish floating cities. Legacy governments and the people on their payroll absolutely do not want their cosy system to collapse because of this. Many countries service annual interest payments on a huge national debt (e.g. USA 69,000 GBP debt per citizen, Italy and the UK 39,000 GBP per citizen, separate from personal debt) and most developed nations will struggle to pay for a steadily ageing population when there are proportionally fewer taxpayers or economically active citizens. It’s not just about protecting the bureaucrats’ lucrative jobs and enjoyment of power. What happens if half of your 20- to 30-year-olds (which the country has recently invested in educating) suddenly emigrate away to a newly founded nation on the high seas? They would not take any of the national debt obligation with them and they wouldn’t pay any taxes to the country they have left. They would instead provide goods and services to the old nation, taking even more financial assets away from them. Legacy governments understand the socio-economic implications from the rise of seasteading (which I believe is now inevitable) and treat it as a threat to their sovereignty, which arrogantly assume must include territories beyond the 200 nm limit of their sovereignty. The best chance could be for the legacy governments to engage with the seasteading transition, to offer a paid military protection service and trade agreement to the new floating nation; caveat — an arrangement which Hellenistic Athens provided for the city states of Greece, until Athens became powerful enough to use that collectively funded navy to threaten and exploit its clients. However, the dinosaurs of legacy governance are building for themselves a new tool which they hope to pass in 2025, leveraging the UN’s International Seabed Authority (ISA) to enable a legal power grab for domination of the high seas, framed as if their motivation is only for caring environmental reasons. The argument goes like this. Commerce needs metals, especially metals like nickel which are used in batteries. On the deep seabed, there are naturally formed nodules rich in metallic ore which can be scooped up from the surface or mined. Although the great majority of animal life in the ocean is within 200 nm of the coastline, the move by the UN is claimed as intended to protect seabed life in the high seas area. The UN Convention of the High Seas (1982) does not establish control over licensing mining in the deep ocean, so the move for land-based authorities now is to take control of what happens there, which conveniently includes legacy governments being able to veto floating cities in international waters, which would otherwise become their competitors for wealth and working population. It’s a pre-emptive strike against innovation.
What now?: The hippie libertarian dream that you might be able to set up your own commune, free from external authority, pay no taxes, smoke weed and open fire randomly when drunk appears to be disappearing against the natural resistance put up by legacy governments. They don’t appreciate challengers, especially if they might someday be faced with a civilisation of rich pirates, preferring to keep control themselves while they can dictate international order, thank you very muchly. Therefore, the leading options for seasteading appear to be things the Seasteading Institute is already supporting:
Seasteads, although houses, can be registered under land-based national flags as ships. Some of the smaller nations of the world would be happy to extend this service for a competitively low fee. That seems like a good idea but you can only register a ship under a national flag if you also have insurance and vice versa, which requires adhering to all of the maritime regulations and compliance inspections. Suddenly, you’ve accepted a bunch of regulations (designed for hulled vessels) which you were hoping to get away from. Work needs to be done on establishing a legal and regulatory framework (partial exemption) for seasteads.
The next idea is much easier: To anchor seasteads on existing island nations which are becoming submerged. This seems like a win-win solution as the small nation being swallowed will continue to be populated and exist in a viable state. It will continue to have international friends (to financially guide that nation’s vote at the UN), it will retain control of the fishing and hydrocarbon extraction rights and licenses for hundreds of miles of surrounding ocean, it can license shipping and it will keep its own dedicated internet address prefix. Eleutheria is the first example of a private city on a site licensed by a submerging nation, currently under formation and where the organisers are trying to finalise a sovereign lease with the Pacific nation of Tuvalu. With a sovereign lease, the land above and below water would still belong to the host nation but Eleutheira would have legal jurisdiction over the territory for the period of the lease, e.g. 99 years. With free movement on or off the floating platform, the floating city can offer employment to the host population, pay their government a leasehold income and provide potentially life-saving refuge to them in the event of a hurricane or tsunami arriving. Do you like the sound of this scenario? Zero vested interests and full scope for founding-father-level society building? What do you think the tax system should look like or how do you choose your representatives? Can the city take on ‘sovereign’ debt or is this going to be survival of the fittest? What about deciding which laws are sensible and which to drop? Should design and manufacturing of the city’s components be completely unregulated? Under what circumstances can the state intervene against anti-social residents, or do something if a family is perceived to be endangering their children? How will the economic symbiosis with the host population work? Then there’s the question that follows from success: Can everyone move to this city or are there constraints to pick and choose ‘people like us’? The concern with Eleutheria might be its overtly Christian filter on potential colonists, but there will be plenty of alternatives, such as this latest one:
“In collaboration with the Maldives government, Ocean Builders is proud to introduce the Maldives Floating City, featuring our innovative SeaPods. This project offers eco-friendly, floating homes that harmoniously blend modern living with marine conservation.”
As a complicated thought experiment and successor to Plato’s Socratic Dialogue Republic (reimagining society in 375 BC), I find this subject fascinating, fully realistic but just over the horizon.
