How to build your own country – CNN

By 2020, Blue Frontiers, our for-profit spinoff from The Seasteading Institute, a nonprofit research and advocacy organization, plans to provide fresh jurisdictions on floating sustainable islands designed to adapt organically to sea level change. These will be privately financed and built by local maritime construction firms employing the latest in sustainable blue tech.

Of course, the need for seasteads could not be greater. Americans are fed up with their government -- in a recent Washington Post-ABC News poll, nearly two-thirds of Americans reported that they trust neither the Democratic or Republican establishment to represent them.

A modular wavebreaker shelters Artisanopolis, a model seastead, in shallow coastal waters. Greenhouse domes will provide locally grown food. Courtesy of Gabriel Scheare, Chile.

Fast-forward over two hundred years, and most land has been claimed by governments established in previous centuries -- leaving the high seas to serve as the latest frontier for innovation.

That same year, two Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, Peter Thiel and Patri Friedman, co-founded The Seasteading Institute to bring a startup sensibility to the problem of government monopolies that are too big to succeed.

The first permanent businesses on the high seas could be sovereign floating hospitals that provide cutting-edge care to patients who choose them. Design concept by Edward McIntosh, 2014, Ecuador.

So where will the Wozniaks of governance go?

Gather your kindred spirits, forge a business plan to sell a unique service to the world and entice people to choose your floating island. If immigrants arrive and create a thriving community, your floating town could expand and grow into a city. If your floating island goes bankrupt, it will be disassembled and sold off to competing seasteads.

Seasteads 3D-printed on the ocean will not resemble skyscrapers rooted in bedrock. The City of Meriens follows the form and function of a manta ray. Jacques Rougerie Architecte, France.

There's no shortage of innovators who believe they can create better societies, and no shortage of funders who want to invest in the New Blue World. Since people will be able to select and reject seasteads voluntarily, an evolutionary market process that will discover better ways of living together will naturally emerge.

Residents will have more direct influence over their floating society of a few hundred than they would have over an old nation of hundreds of millions. Also, unlike present governments, floating islands are no threat to other nations.

Small floating cities already proliferate on our oceans. Oil rig workers typically work two weeks out of every four in floating accommodations that meet hotel standards, where they enjoy saunas, gyms, maid and laundry services and satellite TV. Their platforms, each the size of one or two football fields, are frequently stable enough to play ping pong.

Metropolis 2055: Modular neighborhoods can detach and move to other seasteads or form new seasteads. These are the fluid mechanics of voluntary societies. Courtesy of Tyler Kreshover, USA.

Meanwhile, French Polynesia has offered to host the first pilot seastead. This ancient culture of navigators has been choosing among islands and founding new societies for millennia. Leaders in French Polynesia reached out to The Seasteading Institute to let us know they possess all the features seasteading needs to get started: calm warm waters, natural wave breakers and a youth culture eager to work in incubation hubs for blue tech.

On January 13, 2017, French Polynesia signed a Memorandum of Understanding with The Seasteading Institute, agreeing to work together on legislation for a "special governing framework," so pioneers can offer innovative societies in a protected Tahitian lagoon.

The prototype for their floating islands has already been built in the Netherlands by our Dutch engineers at DeltaSync in partnership with Public Domain Architects. The Floating Pavilion in Rotterdam is sustainable, solar-powered and mobile, a sterling example of what the Dutch call "climate-proof architecture."

So let's let a thousand nations bloom.

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How to build your own country - CNN