Craig is temporarily a post-doctoral fellow at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute who is looking for a permanent position. He spends most of his time balancing his overwhelming geekdom with normalcy so he can function in the real world. Luckily his wife likes his geekiness.
Peter Etnoyer is a Graduate Research Associate at the Harte Research Institute for Gulf of Mexico Studies, Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi. He studies deep corals and ocean fronts, and he loves to be on the water.
Kevin Zelnio is a Graduate Student Researcher at Penn State studying the ecology of hydrothermal vent and methane seep communities. He raises awareness of the plight of the spineless through folk music.
By now you probably realize that Peter, Kevin, and I are more than ready to burn our terrestrial dwellings down in favor of living among sea creatures in some oceanic utopia. Peter and I have discussed several options for this.
To our list of potential inhabitable salty structures comes a new venture from Peter Thiel. Thiel is founder of PayPal, a Google Engineer, and a former programmer for Sun Microsystems. With $500,000 of his money, The Seasteading Institute has been launched dedicated to "creating experimental ocean communities with diverse social, political, and legal systems." As Wired puts it, "A permanent, quasi-sovereign nation floating in international waters."
Plans are for a prototype, a seastead, in San Francheezy Bay by 2010. You can read the full Seastead Manifesto by Patri Friedman and Wayne Gramlich, founders of the institute.
Technology
Comments
When I see the Sears tower bobbing up and down the western seaboard flying a pirate flag ... I'll know it's you guys.
Posted by: Jives | May 19, 2008 1:02 PM
No offense, but Roy of Sealand is decades ahead of you guys
Posted by: Jim Lemire | May 19, 2008 1:47 PM
I remember Bob Ballard going off on this topic during an episode of Scientific American Frontiers. And that was ~5 years ago.
And quasi-sovereign sounds like double-speak for ocean-dumping (sewage and trash) with even less regulation than what is available now. That is, there are fewer landfills available at sea so how are they going to deal with waste?
Posted by: JasonR | May 19, 2008 4:26 PM
JasonR: I'm really curious about the reasons you'd expect these people to turn their immediate surroundings with waste and refuse. After all, they'll be floating in it.
Posted by: Jesrad | May 20, 2008 3:25 AM
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bioshock An underwater utopia? Those things always end up full of mutants and cyborgs with drill-hands. And worst of all, libertarians.
Posted by: Baratos | May 20, 2008 5:48 AM
Oh, they'll pollute.
And even the proponents say they'll pollute.
That's the trouble with new frontiers. They give people an excuse to abuse the frontier they're at now.
Posted by: Jives | May 20, 2008 5:48 AM
"JasonR: I'm really curious about the reasons you'd expect these people to turn their immediate surroundings with waste and refuse. After all, they'll be floating in it."
Since when did that stop populations of any organism from overunning their environment and then being decimated by diseases and starvation caused by themselves?
And forgive me, but the first thing I thought when I saw the illustrations above was "floating fortress". It looks all the world like a souped up aircraft carrier, and I'm telling you, that's exactly how some communities of people would like to use such a resource for attacking other people.
I'm not saying it isn't an idea worth exploring. Just take into account the diversity of human nature. Not all communities will be peace-loving science geeks.
Posted by: yogi-one | May 20, 2008 8:46 AM
Just as a matter of pedantry, Mr. Thiel is one of the three people founding the institute. He's the one that was a founder of PayPal; the other two are an engineer at Google and a semi-retired Sun programmer.
Posted by: Joe Ardent | May 22, 2008 5:30 PM