Floating Cities: The ocean as humanity's next frontier

Here are some practical elements that mean that seasteading is not going to work the way it's current proponents want it to.

1. Seasteads will require enormous amounts of hard, barely rewarding work to be even marginally functional at first.

2. Much of that work will be farming, and much of the rest will be weather-related; preparing the vessel to deal with storms and dealing with the damage wrought by weather.

3. Speaking of weather, the volume and intensity of open ocean storms has been increasing for the past three decades and will continue doing so for the forseeable future.

4. Ocean aquaculture can be quite a difficult proposition, particularly if you're in an area that lacks an existing nutrient cycle.

5. Political autonomy doesn't work the way people think it does. Sure you can give yourself some breathing room, maybe a new set of building codes; some structures that will let you run business a bit more freely; and those tend to be beneficial. But what about human rights? What if a group wants to experiment with allowing human slavery? Or post natal birth-control where only worthy warriors are allowed to become people? You can generate a whole menagerie of horror stories, but for the most part the upshot is "Autonomy within limits." And then you have to have an open debate about what the limits are. Or not, maybe the seasteasds will be a giant set of floating Dubai's without Islamic temperance to limit the abuses. Either way seasteads are likely to be fragile enough in the first few years that cohesive social structures will be a requirement for survival. Which argues against the Spencerian libertarianism that seems to be the default position of many interested in the topic. I rather suspect that successful seasteads will have social structures that look more like Kibbutzim than libertarian autonomies.

1) i love how credulous this article is. Even people who have only ever played the Bioshock games, and have never thought about anything else can see beyond the 9th grade level ethics/civics necessary to see what the problems with sea-steading are.

2) Are we seriously citing the freedom ship of all things as an example of what the future of sea steading might be like? http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2514936/The-i...

Cities are complicated. Cruise ships are complicated. (Anybody remember http://www.cnn.com/2013/02/11/travel/cruise-ship-fire/ ?) I would looooove to hear someone explain what the logistics and supply chain management necessary to run a city-sized cruise ship would have to look like (note, none of these sea-steading articles ever discuss this question). And, sorry just to harp on the Bioshock thing again, but seriously: http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2013/11/28/article-2514936-19... and http://img1.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20130412063520/bioshock/i...

3) If you have enough money to sea-stead, or get yourself onto a hypothetical freedom ship... is paying your taxes and following a country's laws really so onerous that you would abandon your family and social network in order to move out onto the ocean onto platforms with experimental levels of quality & sustainability? (I mean, maybe you're an engineering nerd and you think it'd be awesome to live out on the water. But in what way does that dove-tail with the political aspirations of sea-steading? Why not just get yourself a boat if you've got that much money?)

"...creating communities that have political autonomy whilst existing under the sovereignty of a host state."

That is the part that is going to get interesting, IMO. I am imagining a weed smoking, hip hop loving, skinny jean wearing, cell phone using society just 5 miles outside of North Korea.