Response To Climate Change: Seasteading

Used under a Creative Commons license from Flickr user mlinksva

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


It should come as no surprise that Patri Friedman, son of anarcho-capitalist professor David Friedman, and grandson of Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman, is a guy who prides himself on having innovative and controversial ideas. The project he’s been devoted to for the past year and a half is called the Seasteading Institute, a research center with a mission “to further the establishment and growth of permanent, autonomous, ocean communities, enabling innovation with new political and social systems.”

Where did the youngest Friedman get this idea? “I wanted to find other countries that I could possibly settle in,” Friedman said. “After researching places that people have ex-patriated to like Costa Rica, I realized that no country is better than the USA. So I looked into the idea of forming new nations. The ocean is the best place to do this, because in the ocean you don’t have to fight with others as you would have to on land.” The Institute defines seasteading as creating “permanent dwellings on the ocean—homesteading the high seas.”

Friedman cites Marshall Savage’s The Millenial Project: How To Conquer The Galaxy In Eight Easy Steps and Wayne Gramlich, the man who coined the term “seasteading” in the early 80s, as inspirations for his work. Gramlich happened to live just two miles from Friedman: The two met and the rest is history, or should I say future.

Friedman’s ideal is to live in a society where the rules are his own morals. He says that this approach was selfish at first, but he then realized that he could create a movement that is larger than his own personal utopia. “Let lots of different groups try out their own ideas about utopia,” he said. “They could vote to have a communist government. Small numbers of people can try a better way to live. A colony could start with about 100 people. They’d have to be dedicated but you don’t have to find that many of them.”

But creating utopias wouldn’t be the only benefit of seasteading: Friedman believes that  mobile, floating societies will be more

resistant to climate change than land-based civilizations, particularly when fighting rising sea levels. “The threat of an ice age is much more disastrous than global warming,” he said. And should such an ice age come, Friedman thinks, it would be easier to move people toward the equator if they lived on seasteads instead of on land.

As for how these seasteads would be powered, there’s solar energy, wind energy, wave energy, algae and phytoplankton energy, oceanic thermal energy, and more. Fossil fuels would only serve as a backup energy source.

Though Friedman received an initial $500k investment from Paypal founder Peter Thiel in 2008, the financial meltdown has crushed his first dreams of creating a luxury hotel/colony off the coast of Southern California any time soon. When I asked him if he thinks he’ll see these ideas come to fruition in his lifetime, the 33-year-old Friedman said, “It won’t be for at least another decade, but I have many decades left.”

Fact:

Mother Jones was founded as a nonprofit in 1976 because we knew corporations and billionaires wouldn't fund the type of hard-hitting journalism we set out to do.

Today, reader support makes up about two-thirds of our budget, allows us to dig deep on stories that matter, and lets us keep our reporting free for everyone. If you value what you get from Mother Jones, please join us with a tax-deductible donation today so we can keep on doing the type of journalism 2024 demands.

payment methods

Fact:

Today, reader support makes up about two-thirds of our budget, allows us to dig deep on stories that matter, and lets us keep our reporting free for everyone. If you value what you get from Mother Jones, please join us with a tax-deductible donation today so we can keep on doing the type of journalism 2024 demands.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate