The Seasteading Institute: a Daring Vision of Futuristic Floating Cities
For those following the evolution of seasteading with detached interest, a six-figure donation to the effort might be enough to make the following sink in: floating cities are not just fantasies, but real-world possibilities.
Peter Thiel is famous for founding PayPal and investing early in Facebook, but may become known next as the godfather of an oceanic Utopian movement of floating cities. The catch, of course: even if they are constructed, not everyone can afford to leave their mainland homes to live on such expensive-to-build aquatic libertarian paradises.
There are, in fact, many marvelous precedents for what he and the Seasteading Institute are attempting, from a scratch-built floating trash island (constructed not once but twice in Mexico by another man on a mission) called Spiral Island to such recycled micronations as Sealand, adapted from an army sea fort. Only time will tell, but Thiel, ever the early adopter, anticipates tens of millions of people living on these luxury platforms within the next decade.
About the Seasteading Institute
“The Seasteading Institute is a nonprofit organization, based in California. It was founded in 2008 by activist, software engineer and political economic theorist Patri Friedman, grandson of Nobel Prize winning economist Milton Friedman, and technology entrepreneur, investor and philanthropist Peter Thiel. At The Seasteading Institute, we believe that experiments are the source of all progress: to find something better, you have to try something new. But right now, there is no open space for experimenting with new societies. That’s why we work to enable seasteading communities — floating cities — which will allow the next generation of pioneers to peacefully test new ideas for how to live together.”
“We support aquapreneurs to actively work on projects that will help humanity build floating, politically autonomous, environmentally restorative cities. As a nonprofit organization, our role is not to build seasteads ourselves, but to set the stage in order to empower others to do so.”
