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| "Seasteading" A New Home |
If you can't find the right nation for yourself out of the current 190 on the earth, a team of SIlicon Valley millionaires might be cooking up a scheme that's right up your alley.
Peter Thiel, founder of internet company PayPal, has donated $500,000 to a Google engineer and a former Sun Microsystems programmer who have launched The Seasteading Institute. The goal is to establish experimental ocean communities.
Within the next two years, the Institute plans to put their first "seastead" into the San Francisco Bay before, they hope, going on to deep-water city-states. "There's a history of a lot of crazy people trying this sort of thing, and the idea is to do it in a way that's not crazy," Joe Lonsdale, the Institute's chairman, told Wired.
Rather than plunging into the project hoping that it works perfectly from the beginning, the Institute plans on first building a prototype for only a few million dollars. They will scale down and modify an existing off-shore oil rig for the prototype.
The seastead they create will consist of a reinforced concrete tube with external ballasts at the bottom that can be filled with air or water to lower or raise the platform on top. The design, called a spar, allows the platform to better withstand the ocean waves by minimizing the amount of structure exposed.
Residents, given about 300 square feet of space per person, would live inside the spar tube and the platform on top could hold buildings, gardens, solar panels, wind turbines and satellites for internet access.
"We're not trying to pick the one strategy because we think there will be multiple people who want one for multiple reasons," Wayne Gramlich, one of the Institute's founders, told Wired.
The Institute estimates that it would cost a few hundred million dollars to build a seastead capable of housing a few thousand people. The group envisions a day that these cities populate the seas.
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