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Paypal billionaire Peter Thiel...has teamed up with the grandson of libertarian icon Milton Friedman, Patri Friedman, to try and develop a “seastead,” or a permanent and autonomous dwelling at sea. Friedman formed the “Seasteading Institute” in 2008, and Thiel has donated more than a million dollars to fund its creation...
they claim a floating city could be just years away. The real trick is finding a proper location to build this twenty-first century Atlantis. Currently, they are attempting to find a host nation that will allow the floating city somewhat close to land, for the calm waters and ability to easily travel to and from the seastead.
In recent years there have been reports of similar efforts, like the Freedom Ship, a floating city designed to house 50,000 people, with a landing strip on top of the vessel.
Such concepts raise the questions, "Can these communities create new social structures when the subconscious societal norms we all grow up with have such a powerful influence on our expectations?" and "Is the ocean really the best place to site these communities, given how powerful, treacherous, and corrosive an environment the sea is?"
(Score: 2) by CoolHand on Thursday March 19 2015, @12:37PM
This might be a stupid thought for some reason of which I'm not thinking, but, why wouldn't they start building hulls of ships and structures like this out of plastic? We know that the ocean definitely isn't very corrosive to that.. [wikipedia.org]
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(Score: 2) by Immerman on Thursday March 19 2015, @05:16PM
Most likely because while it may be immune to seawater, it's generally highly vulnerable to sunlight, and will lose structural integrity rapidly. Plus the strength-to-weight ratio is usually pretty bad even when new, an important consideration when your fuel costs scale by the ton.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 19 2015, @07:13PM
That's not a problem. The builder of the city will be liable to make amends to any survivors after failure of the structure, assuming such language was put into the contract, and assuming that there was a government entity with standing to enforce the contract. Future floating cities would, of course, benefit from the free market forces that would discourage future floating city builders from building unsound structures.