Seasteading – the next living space frontier

As land becomes more valuable, as well as more vulnerable to sometimes chaotic weather changes future thinkers are looking for new places for man to start calling home. As much as there are those of us who would like to see and honest effort to get our species off of planet Earth it isn’t something that I see happening for many generations. In the mean time the hunt for new places to live keeps going on.

One of the areas that has always head some kind of allure as a human living space has been the sea, wither on top of the water or under it. While there can be just as many hurdles for living under the oceans as there is for living off of the planet there has been a growing movement for creating sustainable living areas that area a part of the ocean surface. The term being widely accepted for this movement is seasteading and is being heavily promoted by The Seasteading Institute who recently held a design competition for seasteading designs.

The design competition for seasteading was held by non-profit organization The Seasteading Institute (TSI) whose managing members are a mix of Silicon Valley investors, bright-eyed economists, and engineering gurus, who hail from big name companies that were once small ventures including Paypal, Google, and Sun Microsystems. At first glance, the TSI mission for “growth of permanent, autonomous ocean communities, enabling innovation with new political and social systems” could seem like a new twist on libertarianism. But clearly stated at their first annual conference last October, they are not just focused on politics, but conscious of high profit margins and ecological innovations. They plan to take advantage of the 70% of the earth that does not currently have any real estate value – the ocean.

Source: Inhabitat :: Are Ocean Societies the New Frontier for Sustainable Living?

Given some of the design ideas and as long as they had really good broadband connections I wouldn’t hesitate to give living on one of these habitats a shot.

graphics courtesy of Inhabitat