Seasteading 101: How to Build the World’s First Society-at-Sea | Marc Collins | Big Think

A question I get quite often is, “What is Seasteading?” And Seasteading started out, I guess, in 2008. It’s a movement. It started out as a non-profit, so it’s called the Seasteading Institute, based in California. But I think—just a couple of months ago—Seasteading is actually a word that’s recognized by the Oxford dictionary, and what it means is living on platforms on the open oceans and with new forms of society.

So the way I got involved in Seasteading is I was a government minister in French Polynesia; so a lot of people know my country by the name of Tahiti. And when I left the government I was looking at interesting opportunities for what we could do, especially in terms of sea level rise mitigations. That’s an issue that’s quite front of mind for a lot of Pacific islanders, especially now. And I had come across this institute and read about them; there was a lot of media focus on them back in 2008, 2010, 2012.

So basically, I reached out to the institute and said my understanding was that they had built a huge network of specialists—of aquapreneurs, of scientists, researchers, investors. But what the movement was missing was the support, strong support, of a government that was willing to have a light hand on regulation and allow such an ambitious project as the world’s first sustainable, self-sustaining, floating island.

So French Polynesia had the advantage when I reached out to Seasteading. They have several things that the institute was interested in. And one of the first questions they asked was about connectivity. So, you know, is your country connected to the internet backbone? Connectivity is obviously crucial for big data that is going to be generated by the researchers and the scientists, so the first thing was: "Do you have a submarine cable?" So we checked that one off.

In 2010, French Polynesia connected to Hawaii, so we’re right on the internet backbone. Huge unused capacity, 99 percent unused, so obviously available for research. And the second major concern was about hurricanes, cyclones, and tsunamis. So basically, "All right, we’re going to be doing this pilot project floating island. Obviously, the weather and the situation in your country is important to us."

So we did some research. I already knew, being from French Polynesia, that this was a very rare occurrence. I think we’ve had two hurricanes in the last hundred years that had significant damage. There was property damage, a very light loss of life, and tsunamis are not really an issue for us. We’re in the middle of the South Pacific, and so we get at least an eight-hour window before any tsunami were to hit us. But just given the geomorphology of the islands, we don’t get these high waves that you get when you have a continental shelf off your city.

The objective of the pilot is to get all of these technologies tested on a smaller scale. It’s small, yet we should be able to support around 200 people. So our objective is 200 to 250 people living there full time. There would be about a third research and scientists, a third will be people who just love to live on Seasteads. And we’ve got a long list of people who want to come live on a Seastead. Another third we believe are going to be startups and entrepreneurs that are building technologies around the ocean.

So basically, all sort of blue tech: you’ve got underwater drones, you’ve got all of these different types of startups that are linked to the space. We also have the issue of energy. Now, obviously, we need internet on board these platforms. We will have some low-energy lighting, low-energy pumps, and we’re going to be very careful with everything that goes on board these structures, but we feel fairly confident that there are enough ways for us to generate energy.

So we’re looking primarily at floating solar panels. There’s a company we’re in discussions with in France that’s got some interesting technology. It’s not just as simple as putting solar panels on the water. It’s the corrosion resistance, it’s the wave, you know, how...