Floating cities aim to colonise the sea
In the clear, shallow water off the south coast of Tahiti, the next leap forward in the evolution of civilisation will begin with 15 floating islands being towed offshore.
The government of French Polynesia has signed an agreement allowing the first self-reliant floating communities to begin testing and to press ahead with a prototype next year.
The Seasteading Institute, a notfor-profit organisation in San Francisco and co-founded in 2008 with money from Peter Thiel, a founder of Paypal, has spent almost a decade trying to convince people that living on water is sane and viable.
Now its vision of independent pop-up states floating in international waters is closer to becoming reality. ‘‘I’m extremely optimistic,’’ said Joe Quirk, president of the institute and a partner in Blue Frontiers, a company that will build and run the self-governing islands.
‘‘We are going to discover Planet Ocean long before we go to Planet Mars,’’ he said. ‘‘I think or at least I hope that by 2050 there will be a variety of floating nanonations demonstrating better ways of living together that will change the governance structures of old continental nations.’’ The idea of building new communities on the water, known as seasteading, has been around since at least 1981, when Ken Neumeyer wrote about living sustainably and independently at sea on a boat.
In 1995 the Kevin Costner film Waterworld envisaged a future after the sea levels had risen to flood the surface of the earth and brought the idea of isolated groups living on floating ‘‘atolls’’ to the big screen.
A decade later Patri Friedman, grandson of the economist Milton Friedman, quit his job at Google and set up the Seasteading Institute. After years of struggle, interest in building floating cities is taking off. Recently ‘‘it’s been kind of a whirlwind,’’ Mr Quirk, 51, said. He envisages a cluster of 15 floating islands with bungalows, subsea apartments and an underwater restaurant with 100 seats. Eventually Mr Quirk hopes that millions of people will live on structures so enormous that they will not be able to feel them move with the ocean current.
That remains a distant goal, though. The first seasteads will be in shallow water and will be ‘‘tethered lightly though firmly to the sea bed because to create civil society we first have to solve the sea sickness problem’’.