I'm delighted to find this topic being discussed here, and surprised that no one has yet posted any links to
http://seasteading.org. A group of seasteading enthusiasts has for the past three years built a flotilla of boats and improvised floating art projects as
http://ephemerisle.org. We simply put together a prototype seastead in the middle of the Sacramento River Delta and live on it for the better part of a week. Not all of us are experienced mariners, so it is helpful to have seasoned sailors on the crew, but every year we learn more about properly anchoring in the location, checking tide tables so we're not caught unprepared, and learning how best to tie up a bunch of boats into a floating "village." The next Ephemerisle will be born on June 6, 2012 and dismantled on June 10, 2012, and everyone is welcome to attend. It is an experiment in radical self-reliance and, like Burning Man, you pretty much have to fend for yourself, so be prepared to exercise your freedom AND take responsibility for yourself. A French television crew joined us for a few days last year, and the final program has been posted online at
http://vimeo.com/32372015. The Ephemerisle segment is the last part of the program.
Of course, practical seasteading, as envisioned by TSI, goes far beyond putting together a flotilla of boats on the ocean. The Seasteading Institute does research into the technology of establishing floating platforms that could become self-sustaining communities that would be able to weather storms, produce marketable goods and services and experiment with novel forms of social organization.
Getting to that level will require a lot of hard work, trial and error and small incremental projects building upon one another. The first step is "shipsteading," taking existing technology and adapting it to a semi-permanent floating community or business enterprise. The first commercial shipsteading venture has just been launched this year in the form of
http://blueseed.co. This project has generated a huge amount of press in the past two months since they began raising venture capital, and the core founders of BlueSeed were all at last month's Bitcoin meetup at Google, so bitcoin is definitely on the table as a business opportunity they are interested in pursuing.
Ultimately, marine engineers advise building semi-submersible structures on the template of offshore oil platforms, which are proven to be durable and reliable under the most challenging of conditions, albeit an astonishingly expensive endeavor. But this is not a short-term project. Those of us invested in the seasteading concept are in it for the long term. This is a vision that we believe is not only possible, but inevitable. As governments become increasingly repressive of human liberty, it has become clear that land-based governments are sinking, and the only practical alternative is for humans to return to the sea from which our species originated.
