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Creating Free Nations At Sea
Imagine creating a free nation at sea that is outside the territories and laws of any other nation or government. It's called a seastead, not a homestead.
Seasteads are custom-built floating islands. So far, no one has created a new nation state on the high seas that is recognized as a sovereign nation, although the Principality of Sealand is a disputed micronation formed on a discarded sea fort near Suffolk, England.
Once you are outside 200 nautical miles (370 km), countries are not subject to the laws of any sovereign nation. It is self-governing and can create its own free society.
PayPal founder Peter Thiel recently invested $1.25 million to try to make that happen. By offering support to the Seasteading Institute, he has jump-started efforts to create city-state communities afloat on ocean platforms. In 2009, the institute held a 3D design competition to help people visualize what these sea-bound communities may look like.
Seasteads would be small city-states at first, although thegoal is to have tens of millions of seasteading residents by 2050. Architectural plans for a prototype involve a movable, diesel-powered, 12,000-ton structure with room for 270 residents, with the idea that dozens—perhaps even hundreds—of these could be linked together.
Patri Friedman, a former Google engineer, the grandson of the Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman hopes to launch a flotilla of offices off the San Francisco coast next year; full-time settlement, he predicts, will follow in about seven years; and full diplomatic recognition by the United Nations, well, that'll take some lawyers and time.
"The ultimate goal," Friedman says, "is to open a frontier for experimenting with new ideas for government." This translates into the founding of ideologically oriented micro-states on the high seas, a kind of floating petri dish for implementing policies that libertarians, stymied by indifference at the voting booths, have been unable to advance: no welfare, looser building codes, no minimum wage, and few restrictions on weapons.
The structures will be 12,000 tons, diesel-powered and carry around 270 people per unit, as reported by Details Magazine. The idea is to link the structures together to create ocean metropolises equipped to accommodate millions of people.
But here's the kicker: Thiel hopes to place the structures beyond the coastal jurisdiction of existing countries and their laws. Call it a libertarian pipe dream if you will, but he hopes to experiment with different types of government styles. In some cases, he wishes to start up city-states without minimum wages and welfare, with fewer weapons restrictions and "looser" building codes, he says. Seasteading already has a team working on the legal issues involved.
Floating pilots, which will include office buildings, will be placed off the coast of San Francisco as early as next year.
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