“Seasteading” Colony To Be Off-Grid and Offshore
Paypal founder Peter Thiel is funding The Seasteading Institute to investigate the legal and technical advantages of living offshore in off-grid artificial habitats.
It might sound like the setting for the videogame Bioshock, but the institute isn’t playing around: It plans to splash a prototype into the San Francisco Bay within the next two years, the first step toward establishing deep-water city-states, or what it calls “seasteads” — homesteads on the high seas.
From Kurzweil AI’s summary:
The seasteaders want to build their first prototype for a few million dollars, by scaling down and modifying an existing off-shore oil rig design known as a “spar platform.”
In the search for freedom in building a Libertarian free country, the colonists could also further the cause of fighting pollution in the ocean, test new off-grid power remotely perhaps using ocean thermal differences and wave energy, and make progress in aquaculture.
November 21st, 2008 at 2:53 pm
[…] After reading an article about a new Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion (OTEC) initiative, I thought back to the off-grid Seasteading project, started by one of PayPal’s founders. […]