Seasteading

  About year ago I wrote a post entitled Micronations, which included a description of Sealand. Because that post has received a large number of hits, I thought you all might be interested in hearing about the The Seasteading Institute:

Seasteading means to create permanent dwellings on the ocean – homesteading the high seas. A seastead, like in the picture above, is a structure meant for permanent occupation on the ocean.
Why would you want to do that?  Because the world needs a new frontier, a place where those who are dissatisfied with our current civilization can go to build a different (and hopefully better) one.

The Institute was founded by Wayne Gramlich and Patri Friedman. They hope to have a prototype sailing off the coast of San Francisco by 2009.

Read the Institute’s press releases; watch a PowerPoint show by Patri Friedman. And view an artist’s conception of what a large seastead based on the spur design could look like. The Seasteading Institute envisions vast clumps of these structures forming city-states in the open ocean. (Illustration: Valdemar Duran)

Here is an article from Wired: Peter Thiel Makes Down Payment on Libertarian Ocean Colonies (05/19/08)
With a $500,000 donation from PayPal founder Peter Thiel, a Google engineer and a former Sun Microsystems programmer have launched The Seasteading Institute, an organization dedicated to creating experimental ocean communities “with diverse social, political, and legal systems.” “Decades from now, those looking back at the start of the century will understand that Seasteading was an obvious step towards encouraging the development of more efficient, practical public-sector models around the world,” Thiel said in a statement.

Here is a description of the Principality of Sealand, another “new frontier”: 
The history of Sealand is a story of a struggle for liberty. Sealand was founded on the principle that any group of people dissatisfied with the oppressive laws and restrictions of existing nation states may declare independence in any place not claimed to be under the jurisdiction of another sovereign entity. The location chosen was Roughs Tower, an island fortress created in World War II by Britain and subsequently abandoned to the jurisdiction of the High Seas. The independence of Sealand was upheld in a 1968 British court decision where the judge held that Roughs Tower stood in international waters and did not fall under the legal jurisdiction of the United Kingdom. This gave birth to Sealand’s national motto of E Mare Libertas, or “From the Sea, Freedom”.

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