Guest essay by Eric Worrall
Worried about rising sea levels? According to the Seasteading Institute and Blue Frontiers, the solution is a self governing libertarian network of floating cities loosely attached to French Polynesia.
A floating Pacific island is in the works with its own government, cryptocurrency and 300 houses
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Camille Bianchi
Published 5:01 AM ET Fri, 18 May 2018
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Mezza-Garcia spoke with CNBC’s Matthew Taylor about what she sees as the trouble with governments, and why she believes tech startups should head to Tahiti.
This seavangelesse is a researcher for the Blue Frontiers and Seasteading Institute’s highly-anticipated Floating Island Project.
The project is a pilot program in partnership with the government of French Polynesia, which will see 300 homes built on an island that runs under its own governance, using a cryptocurrency called Varyon.
“Once we can see how this first island works, we will have a proof of concept to plan for islands to house climate refugees,” she said.
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“There is significance to this project being trialed in the Polynesian Islands. This is the region where land is resting on coral and will disappear with rising sea levels,” Mezza-Garcia said.
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“If you don’t want to live under a particular government,” she said, “people will be able to just take their house and float away to another island.”
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The idea of regime shopping, moving to different countries to avoid mis-governance, has sound historical precedent. The USA was settled by people who were fed up with the old world. My favourite history book, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers suggests the fractured politics of Renaissance Europe, and the ease with which talented individuals could relocate, forced European governments to compete for business. The restraint the risk of losing tax paying merchants and craftsmen imposed on the tyrannies of the day led to the rise of the modern world.
But I can’t help thinking the seasteading utopians haven’t fully thought through all the issues.
Polynesia is subject to some truly horrendous storms. The last place you want to be when a cyclone or hurricane hits is floating on the water.
Cyclone hits French Polynesia
updated 2/4/2010 4:25:02 PM ET
PAPEETE, Tahiti — Cyclone Oli buffeted French Polynesia on Thursday, forcing the evacuation of thousands of residents and tourists to churches, schools and temples.
The archipelago that includes Tahiti was under red alert until the cyclone passes, and all roads were closed. Towering waves were buffeting buoys off the coast of Tahiti’s capital, Papeete. French television showed a naval ship pitching in the storm.
Around 3,500 people in Tahiti and Moorea who risked being swept away or inundated by lashing waves were evacuated, officials said, and about 50 homes were destroyed in Moorea.
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If climate alarmists are right, those superstorms will get worse. Bad news for floating structures.
I suspect the seasteaders will go forward despite any unresolved issues. The urge to homestead, to get some elbow room, relocate away from people who you cannot stand, is as old as humanity.
Despite the odds, and their whacky ideas about climate change, I hope the Seasteaders succeed. The risk of high value entrepreneurs relocating to seastead communities might place increased pressure on traditional governments to lower taxes and cut red tape.
Update (EW): Added a video from the Seasteading Institute website. The image at the top of this post is not necessarily one of the constructions planned by the seasteading pioneers, it is a copyleft image of a seastead. Sorry for not making this clear.
I think the cyclone objections can be overcome by making the thing large and massive enough.
However to get away from it all, Gerry O’Neill’s space colonies take some beating. Few weather issues too.
Mike, have you ever actually been in a hurricane? Making it large and massive won’t help. The ocean has taken down the largest ships ever built. There’s no safety in size … all that does is give more surface area for the wind to grab on to. Plus with something that massive, how will you anchor it? It will rip out the largest anchors and chains.
w.
@Willis- they would not have to Anchor. The typical ocean currents are 4 to 7 kilometers per hour. So each module having a large electric thruster could maintain station with little power consumed. On my paper plan anyway, heh.
Sandy, Minister of Future
“interzonkomizar May 25, 2018 at 12:39 am”
We already have floating vessels that have electrically powered station keeping/maneuvering thrusters that are extremely powerful and require plenty of power delivered by huge diesel engines. Something the size of a city would need some serious power.
We can use massive anchors.
@Fernando – the problem is not a big enough anchor. The problem is a long strong cable cannot support its own weight.
Sandy, Minister of Future
@Fernando- the avg Pacific ocean depth is 4,000 m.
Sandy
interzonkomizar:
You just need a really long anchor rope.
Interzonkomizar, it doesn’t have to be anchored that deep, and we can use a Kevlar rope spread. It would probably be a bit sturdier than say the Thunder Horse anchor system. Possibly like anchoring the floating LNG plant Shell is installing offshore Australia.
““If you don’t want to live under a particular government,” she said, “people will be able to just take their house and float away to another island.”
This woman sounds crazy. While “floating away”, you have no steerage, no directional control so would be at the mercy of currents and wind. How well would this handle in a 20 meter swell? Not good I would imagine.
Apart from the many technical and supply issues commented on above, just consider this idea of “self-governing” floating communities. I don’t think many would be mini republics with virtuous regard to democracy and respect for human rights whatever the stated intentions. Very quickly you would end up with all manner of quirky and downright nasty groups imposing thuggish rule over the weak. Some would end as rogue or criminal places no one with any sense would want to be anywhere near.
And what exactly would be the legal status of these waterworld enterprises. What about accountability if some collection of floating nut jobs decide to start developing chemical or biological weapons? Or providing a safe heaven for terrorists or other unsavoury enterprises or individuals.
@Moderately Cross- you are probably right that some islands might be Rogue, harboring criminal elements up to no good. As expensive as these are, they would probably be funded by a major Mainland government to carry out their own thuggish Deeds from.
The MinArky i envision would have few rules and would be run by the citizens. Every law that they voted on would have a sunset Limited. For instance if a law receive 51 to 55% it would have a lifetime of 18 months. It received 56 to 65% it would have a lifetime of three years. Of course it would be illegal to murder Steel or damaged property not your own. Most citizens would be armed which would prevent a lot of problems.
International law governing such structures is somewhat vague. However if you were in the middle of the Pacific Ocean and not making trouble for another major power you might be able to claim sovereignty. The main thing about claiming sovereignty is being able to enforce it, heh.
Sandy, Minister of Future
Sandy,Minister of Future (you make me smile with that great title)
You seriously propose letting the inhabitants carry guns! Bad enough they might shoot one another but even worse if their aim is as bad as most people. Loud bangs in the night followed by the entire comunity having to turn out in a desperate search for the holes and plug the leaks. Was it three shots or four? I also suspect it won’t be long before rich billionaires own these new floating condos – I don’t want to live on Elon Musk Atlantis thanks.
Best wishes.
You don’t know what you’ll get. Another North Korea or New Zealand floating on the ocean. You made a good argument about the United States in 1776. We’ve done a good job deciding who gets to be a country a so far.
Won’t all the floating cities raise sea levels even faster? Perhaps they’ll use sea dredged aggregates to offset that.
Haha. That chestnut again. In the 1970 there was a Dutch civil servant with a similar idea for kilometer sized cities floating in the Schelt estuary. He claimed to have gotten the idea from aliens he had met during night-time sailing on those waters. Has he moved to Tahiti I wonder?
Who, the civil servant or the aliens?
“There is significance to this project being trialed in the Polynesian Islands. This is the region where land is resting on coral and will disappear with rising sea levels,” Mezza-Garcia said.
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I hope it’s just the standard talking point of the climatism scam. Otherwise, if she really believes such globull warming nonsense, she is a gullible ignorant fool! And anyone willing to invest in a project with such fool deserves to lose his money.
They have floating cities, they are called ships.
The flaw of the concept is that people rich enough to afford this tax-avoidance scheme already have plenty of other means to do that.
And you need someone in the protection business to fend off pirates and felons anyway. This comes at a price
Would certainly be cheaper and more convenient to colonize a small state, like, say, Maine, Belize, Monte Carlo… Plenty of options already
I have the United States government to fend of felons and pirates. All kinds things. And I think they do an outstanding job.
There are quite a lot of these floating homes dotted along the banks of our canal system here in the U.K. and I suspect elsewhere.
Love boats and water; but they are expensive things and can be very dangerous. Both escalating exponentially with size.
definition “boat: a hole in the water you pour money into”. You may add “according to size”
My own ‘German’ ancestors were driven off their land by French invaders. Similarly, the Irish Potato Famine drove about 1.5 million people to America. Saying they were ‘fed up’ doesn’t quite cover the situation.
Wherever and whenever you look in history, you see the law of supply and demand. link
If the whole point is to avoid sea level rise, there is plenty of land. Flying across America, you see vast tracts of sparsely settled land. Even China has lots of unoccupied land. We’re a long way from needing floating cities.
‘its own government’
An HOA with guns.
We shouldn’t have HOAs or even allow them. People are too stupid and there’s too many bad people who we have to protect people from.
I guess the Global Warming bit is a marketing ploy. As a long-time libertarian I know of no libertarian (except Ron Bailey, of Reason magazine) who believes in AGW. Such projects have been around for a long time. Some are land-based and others, like this one are sea-based.
The word Libertarian does not appear at the home pages of Blue Frontiers or of the Seasteading Institute. It looks like a Belarussian scam, not a Nigerian scam.
Charleston, SC, solved the liveaboard lifestyle mess late in the previous Century as once public moorings were incorporated into the taxbase right up to the federal channel waterway.
A similar logic will be used against moorings on the high seas.
So I moved to a 25 sq.mile island in 5,000+ cubic miles of fresh potable water. It’s better than any city.
The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Gibbon in 1776, the year of the Declaration of Independence, not long after the 1763 Treaty declaring the British Empire in writing, is the favorite of that Empire then as today. Gibbon’s problem was how to avoid the guaranteed collapse in the New Rome. It was this unbearable lurch for empire from the European oligarchy that fulfilled Columbus’ mission.
Seems that fossil is still at work, and Brexit along with Trump, now Italy and Spain is reacting, without pacific rafts….
Gibbon was wrong on several counts
A few thoughts.
I see no effective space for an airport, so helicopters are mandatory. (And very limited, very expensive, require cross-water training and evacuation procedures and practices (see oil field worker training and precautions), and are VERY, VERY difficult to re-supply a “city” with the essentials of daily life. Helicopters also require cross-shipping (unloading and reloading (by hand!) and unloading again on the “island” for every pound of freight or UPS shipment of mail delivery or Fedex/UPS/Amazom/Alibaba box.
Yes, ships can (and do!) provide bulk supplies and are “economical.” (See Hawaii for price guides of having to import everything.) But ships are also very slow. And require additional loading/unloading/storage/handling.
If the “island” is close enough to allow “inefficient” helo trans-shipment, then it is in existing 12 mile/120 mile/200 mile coastal water control and “somebody” already “own it”. If further out, more waves, more storms, more inconvenience to all but the ultra-rich as a tax shelter – which they already have on various (corrupt) islands.
Want to house the ignorant and cheap and near-slaves and poor – who are “threatened” with projected ocean rising of a few feet? This will throw them into a floating no-escape prison of contamination and poverty and crime and filth.
And, although a “concrete” floating ship may APPEAR to withstand internal and external corrosion (since it is not steel), concrete DOES crack under the continuous flexing and movement of ocean structures. The rebar in the concrete walls and decks and hulls WILL crack and rust (Unless made of stainless steel or fiberglass) and unlike steel hulls, concrete CANNOT be repaired or worked on in-place. There is a reason why there have been hundreds of thousands of steel and wooden ships built since the Phoenicians and Romans and Greeks and Chinese. And why the “new” iron and then steel ships immediately replaced their predecessors as soon as metalworking became cheaper than wood 150 years ago.
There is a reason that NO concrete ships have EVER been successful, even in the emergencies of war construction!
Drydocking requires long tows to a facility large enough for the oil platforms – equally rare. So, when something does break or have a problem, yoiu cannot “go underneath” and fix it without VERY, VERY expensive underwater repairs and equipment. (Agains, see oil platform and well repair and construciton.
RACook- I have to say my plan for my seastead, Arkon One,, has an elevated Runway of expanded mesh 50 by 800 meters, which will allow STL aircraft takeoff and Landing.
Also within five years it will be self-sufficient in vegetables chicken and pork.
Sandy, Minister of Future
Why not tow a reasonably large piece of the West Antarctic ice sheet to a gyre in the ocean, harvest the local plastic debris to make bubble wrap insulation on site to allow minimal loss of substrate from melting and subduction loss. Cracking could be remedied with solar powered ice makers using melt water. Having a fresh water source would facilitate production of hydroponic crops which given a tropical location could be continuously harvested. No problems with causing or suffering from sea level rise. Better than moving to Mars. Architecture plans would be regular 3 demensional structures with equal sides or an equal radius.
What is that old saying….Fools and their money are soon parted.
I see lots of problems. First it will be very expensive to live there. Second, the units will, of necessity, be very tiny and cramped. therefore Third, they will not get the rich people moving in there that they need because wealthy people can just buy a place in the country somewhere where the government will more or less leave them alone anyway.
That is not counting the big problem of being very susceptible to typhoons and tidal waves.
I don’t people should live in low earth orbit. There’s a lot of problems with that.
The Seasteading idea is sounds great to anyone who never actually lived at sea — idyllic.
There are little itty-bitty problems — like “island economies”, a nation/economy must have something to trade with other nations/economies for the items they cannot produce by themselves. This is why these island countries fall back on tourism, their beautiful beaches and sunny climates are what they have to trade — and little else. Seasteads will have nothing to trade.
And, yes, then there are the storms — the weather. The closest parallels are oil drilling platforms in the North Sea and the Gulf. These are rough-and-ready “floating islands” and the majority are evacuated when big storms threaten. Where are the seasteaders going to go?
I hope the seasteaders are not prone to seasickness — these gently rocking platforms are the worst for inducing mal-de-mer.
@Kip- I guess you didn’t read my prologue. Here is the part you missed …
… ocean-going seasteads that would pay for themselves by hosting genetic research, cloning, transgenic body parts, young blood therapy, stem cell research, and other advanced medical procedures for anti-aging and longevity enhancement.
As for storms, they will have weather radar and detect them at 50 to 80 km away. They will be able to maneuver at 7 to 10 kph and avoid the Storm Center.
A 1 km dia seastead 50 km high will be very stable.
Sandy, Minister of Future
interzonkomizar ==> That is the basic plot of a science fiction novel by Larry Niven and Steven Barnes, “Saturn’s Race” published in 2000.
A decent, though not great, read.
Somehow appropriate that science fiction is being offered as a solution to a mostly science fiction problem.
@Kip- As this seastead is possible to implement with existing technology I would claim it is not science fiction.
Sandy, Minister of Future
We design wings that can withstand quite a bit. It may be flexible and modular.
Well, I find this a lot more attractive than those big manmade islands made from dredged sand in Dubai
The immortal words of Rep. Hank Johnson come to mind.
I love how the video shows a house built right on the beach has waves crashing in the front porch in a high wind.
The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Gibbon, the favorite book for the British Empire of the 1763 Treaty of Paris, was an attempt revive Rome, and avoid inevitable collapse. This oligarchical lurch, by 1776 with the Declaration of Independance, was the unbearable impetus. This fossil is still at in Europe/D.C, with Brexit, and Trump, Italy, Spain, Greece all reacting very like 1776 without rafts to pacific isles.
And, by the way, could it be the “very few” are taking Thor Hayerdahl’s Kontiki to heart? He showed fleets of raft-like boats crisscrossed the Pacific despite typhoons. This “very few” might be fantasising running from multiple declarations of independance – today nowhere to hide.
This is what the fly from (Percy Shelley’s Masque of Anarchy) :
Rise, like lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number!
Shake your chains to earth like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you:
Ye are many — they are few!”
OT: Joe Bastardi is saying this morning that the disturbance coming north out of the western Caribbean has a chance of becoming a minimal CAT I hurricane before it hits the Gulf Coast somewhere between the western Florida Pan Handle and eastern Mississippi Monday. It will NOT be the earliest on record to strike US shores. One hit that same area earlier in May in 1863. But watch out for the climate change hype if it does get classified as a hurricane.
These already exist. The navy calls them aircraft carriers. Sleep 5000, go almost anywhere, semi-autonomous government, pretty much self contained.
Will they open Swiss-style banks to fund the operation while musing on about climate?