Seasteading: The New Frontier
Travel Blog • Michael Yessis • 05.20.08 | 4:21 PM ET
From Wired: “If a small team of Silicon Valley millionaires get their way, in a few years, you could have a new option for global citizenship: A permanent, quasi-sovereign nation floating in international waters.”
The Seasteading Institute, launched in part with a $500,000 donation from PayPal founder Peter Thiel, outlines its mission in its FAQ. Among the questions answered: Why would anyone vacation on a seastead instead of a resort?
Seasteads and islands have different kinds of romance, and will appeal to different people. As long as we can find enough people who think seasteads are romantic, it doesn’t matter if many prefer islands. Niche markets are not necessarily a bad thing for a business, if they aren’t served well by other options, and they are big enough niches. There are people who will find the unique legal status of a seastead appealing, especially because this status will let a seastead have some unique attractions onboard.
There is also the “wow” factor, which the Freedom Ship is appealing to. Seasteads aren’t quite as wowie as a mile-long ship, but they can make up for it by actually getting built. In general, the answer is to leverage the uniqueness of seasteads. And if that only appeals to a tiny fraction of the world, that’s still plenty to start with.
So, for those of you who curse yourselves for not buying Sealand, here’s your second chance.
Email to friend
Twitter
del.icio.us
Digg
Facebook
Furl
Ma.gnolia
Mixx
Reddit
StumbleUpon
Yahoo! Buzz
Michael Yessis is the cofounder and coeditor-in-chief of World Hum.
John M. Edwards 05.21.08 | 12:19 AM ET
Hi Michael:
I’ve always dreamed of owning my own private island. This Seastead is a good runner-up.
I imagine being an enlightened dictator providing for all, with a nominally capitalist and democratic puppet government. The rules for paradise are a work in progress.
Of course, war on the Seastead would be outlawed, and everyone would be involved in one field alone: art.
John M. Edwards
Charles Marlow 05.21.08 | 10:05 AM ET
An interesting opposing perspective of this approach to sea-steading appears in the current issue of the Australian quarterly, Griffith Review: “The last thing any seafarer wants is another structure, permanent or mobile,
impeding a safe passage offshore. Yet the sea-settler, whose understanding of
the sea is less practical and probably more romantic, dreams of man-made
islands… Such structures, however
they look, will be regarded by seafarers as an unwelcome hazard, interfering
with safe navigation to and from adjacent coasts, fouling fishing grounds and probably requiring vessels – as vulnerable offshore oil and gas platforms do – to stand at least half a kilometre clear of them.” It also makes the point that “The United Nations
Convention on the Law of the Sea Treaty (LoST) rejects claims of territory or
special economic standing by private owners of extra-national human-made
islands or structures.”