By: Matthew Marcone
Could the next stage of economic and political evolution take place on water?
That’s the goal of the Seasteading Institute, a group aiming to create small floating cities that are exempt from the government rules and regulations that exist on the mainland.
It’s a concept that I’ve learned about recently and think could potentially be a game changer.
The idea is that while technologies are growing exponentially, existing monopolies and thousands of outdated laws are holding back progress and innovation in a number of industries.
Joe Quirk, a science writer and novelist believes that floating cities could be used to reengineer society and drastically improve our quality of life.
“The more start-up societies we can create, the more innovations and progress we can have,” said Quirk. “Decentralized competition creates products and there’s a lack of innovation in the technology of governance. It’s become stagnant. Floating cities would allow innovators on the ocean to discover new ways of living together and learn new ways of governance. The more experiments, the more likely we are to come up with solutions.”
Quirk points to a number of societies that have previously needed to hit the reset button in order to see enormous gains in economic progress. The United States, for example, was founded by people escaping the oppression, overregulation and heavy taxation of Great Britain.
Hong Kong’s independence from China and subsequent success forced the communist country to change its policies, which has helped bring hundreds of millions of people out of poverty. The same thing happened with Malaysia and Singapore, where people broke the chains of oppression and now the world is wealthier and better off because of it.
However Quirk points out that all of the land on earth has now been colonized and monopolized, making the oceans the next logical frontier for colonization.
A feasibility study was created and concluded that the Seasteading Institute could create the first small floating city with some level of independence by 2020 within the territorial waters of a host nation, although a number of engineering setbacks still need to be overcome.
These floating nations would be the approximate size of a skyscraper and operate as businesses, having to compete to attract people, money and ideologues to their territory.
Similar projects are already being created by industry. For instance Shell is currently building the world’s first floating liquefied natural gas project approximately 200 miles off the coast of Australia.
Quirk sees the medical field as one that could particularly benefit from the project.
“We want to provide more market innovation on the ocean and that includes floating hospitals,” said Quirk. “Right now dominant industries end up controlling or having heavy influence over regulations. If people could choose among seasteads, it would unleash innovations.”