Sooner or later pretty much everyone with libertarian leanings comes up with the idea of living on the sea in international waters, and I’m no exception. This came up in a conversation with Sean Lynch at the Space Access Society conference, and he pointed me to a very interesting site by some people who are actually making serious plans to do just that. I was on the Oceania project mailing list for most of its life, so I got a chance to see one way not to do this. The greatest value of the Seasteading site is its list of things that have been tried, a much larger list than you might expect. The only real success so far is Sealand, but it’s not for lack of trying.

This is quite important from a transterrestrialist perspective because Seasteading can help debug some of the things that will be needed for permanent and free offworld colonies. Most important are the nontechnical issues, like how to deal with governments (Sealand follows the very simple rule of keeping your head down, helped a great deal by being a neighbor of a country that’s secure militarily and economically). Eventually some Seastead group or other will run into direct conflict with an established nation (as Minerva already did with Tonga) at a level which merits attention from other nations or the UN. At this point precedent will be established that may kill the idea altogether. How things pan out will depend a lot on the details of the conflict. Unfortunately the appeal of Seasteading is driven in large part by a desire to get away from the busybodyism of existing nations, so the things people are likely to do on a Seastead are exactly the things likely to lead to interference, such as freely taking drugs, engaging in prostitution, providing a haven for euthanasia (including pre-death cryopreservation, which most nations will look on as the same thing), and so forth.

Anyway, it’s a great site, with lots of resources and links to a bunch of other sites which are interesting in themselves. I don’t much like the technical aspects of their baseline design (some nasty stress risers at the spar-platform joint, for example), but they are talking about incremental development so those issues will be resolved in due course.

Incidentally, I held off on posting about this until I got the nod from the site’s proprietor, which he gave a couple of days ago, so I’m not in violation of the “please don’t publicize” note on the site. From his email I assume it’s no longer in effect.