A large number of ultra-wealthy people living on a vulnerable platform in the middle of the sea. And because they live in international waters, they aren't protected by any nation. Could there possibly be a better target for pirates?
Piracy is still a problem on the high seas, but does not seem particularly worrisome for a seastead. Much of it is small-scale theft - for example, of the 335 attacks reported in 2001, only 73 involved guns. 16 ships were hijacked, and 21 people killed (all but one in asian waters) [ICC2001]. Being above the waves and strong enough to withstand them, in addition to a small number of firearms, will make a seastead a rather difficult target for this kind of criminal. Also, since seasteads are residential vessels, they have a much higher population density than a pirate's usual target. If the seastead uses a tugboat, the tug will be much more vulnerable, and should be watched.
Some piracy is done by large organized groups who capture entire ships and their goods (often tens of millions of dollars worth) to be fenced. They use forged documents to obtain a new load of cargo from legitimate shippers, and then steal it too. A seastead should not be valuable enough for this type of theft, as it is not a cargo ship, and would be rather conspicuous in port. Why attack a platform of people who would be defending their homes when you could attack a cargo boat with lightly armed sailors who would much rather not die to protect some corporation's cargo?
The armed and organized groups which seasteads should be the most worried about are the navies of traditional governments. Seastead defense is discussed in the infrastructure section.
Besides that, pirates these day tend to operate near the horn of Africa.
A bunch of ultra-libertarians with guns could probably defend against well-organized and reasonably armed pirates. The odds would be better if they trained, had defense shifts and/or patrols and did other militaristic things. Being purely reactive and without any kind of regimentation probably wouldn't work well.
I wonder if that isn't the seed for a form of organization that isn't as free as people would want it to be. Alternately, I'm sure you could hire mercenaries, but then you'd want some counter-balance to their opportunity to turn against you or go rogue.
Are there historical precedents for reactive and non-professional--note, I don't mean non-talented--defenses against outside forces that aren't a fluke (e.g. occur several times with the same defending group)?
You probably wouldn't want a big mutually-assured destruction style deterrent without the kinds of controls listed above, either.
It was very common for those on the American frontier to defend themselves. I think that is a reasonable precedent.
Some of the only laws I would pass on an island would be outlawing violence and establishing mechanisms to enforce this, especially from outside attacks. There are certainly private forces that could get the job done, and I can even imagine a libertarian society decreeing that the government must contract out to multiple competing parties to enforce the laws.
The note about MAD is interesting because it is so easy to destroy a village size seastead.
This is exactly what puzzles me. I live in Minnesota and there is a TON of cheap land out there. A house on 10-20 acres of land for < $300k is pretty normal out in the country. In the 'burbs, you can buy a condo/townhome and pay for it on a waitress's salary & tips.
Hell, you can probably move to the middle of a desert in the Southwest and get more land cheaper. Just build your house underground.
There is simply no way you can get seaborne property cheaper than you can on dry land once you factor in building and maintenance costs.
[edit] You're right about the allodial title, but mortgages can be paid off quickly and taxes are actually useful for some things. Unless you're going to live by yourself on the ocean, there's going to be some form of "taxation" to handle common expenses...like protection from pirates as mentioned.
"The world needs a new model of politics where a diverse ecosystem of providers offers a variety of institutions that evolve to serve their citizens. The open oceans, Earth's last frontier, are the ideal place to nurture this vision of a better world. By making it safe and affordable to settle this frontier, we will give people the freedom to choose the government they want instead of being stuck with the government they get.
Think of government as an industry. Citizens pay taxes, for which they receive government services. Each government has a monopoly over one geographic area, but citizens can switch providers by moving to other countries. This industry has two main features that make it horribly uncompetitive.
❑ High cost of switching providers:
The first is the cost of switching providers. Because of the geographic monopoly, in order to change governments, you have to change countries. That means you have to leave your job, sell your house, pack your possessions, leave your friends, apply for new citizenship, get a new job, buy a new house, and so foth. This cost is enormous compared to any other service provider switch (cell phones, car insurance, even employers). Because of this people are unlikely to do it very often. For it to be worthwhile to move, the difference to an individual between two governments must be higher than this huge cost. This dramatically reduces market feedback for providers of government services. So its natural for govts to exploit the current customer base, because of this huge barrier keeping them from leaving.
Basically, the value of the land to this type of person is less "I own the land" and more "I am totally free of any regulation other than my own". Which should let you predict who is most likely to want to live there.
That said, isolated communities in the US come pretty darn close to this already. There are any number of compounds in the Western states where the government takes a very don't-ask-don't-tell stance towards any number of generally applicable laws. The surprising thing for a lot of people with the raids on the polygamist compound wasn't so much that the government would raid if it suspected you were marrying off children but rather that it would take that much to get them to be interested in a township's internal affairs -- people often expect the government to be rather more omnipotent than it is or cares to be.
This is a very hard engineering problem. And very very expensive.
There are loads of problems, some such as hurricanes and rogue waves discussed in the article, and some such as fire not discussed. None of which are trivial.
Basically what they are talking about is an oil rig without the oil equipment. These will set you back many hundreds of millions of dollars, if not billions. And they still aren't 100% safe. In 1988 a fire broke out on the piper alpha [+] platform in the North Sea, resulting in the death of 2/3 of the crew. The whole platform sank to the bottom of the ocean.
And as marketer notes in the above comment security is a huge issue too.
From a strictly architectural viewpoint, the concept design has a serious flaw. Note that in the inboard units have only windows that look directly at the windows of the inboard unit on the other side. I can't imagine someone taking the risk to live on the ocean, and for a view, can only see in the window of their neighbor. The design definitely needs improvement :)
Underwater is much hard than seasteading. I wouldn't call them equally doomed at all.
The free state project mentioned is an indication that this is actually viable. They want thousands of people to move to New Hampshire to change the state to be more libertarian. 700 already have.
I think that means you can get a few hundred people to move to a man made island, if the conditions on the island were acceptable.
The best outcome would be a confederation of city states that only interact via trading and mutual defense. There is essentially zero competition in government, and this would change that.
The free state project mentioned is an indication that this is actually viable. They want thousands of people to move to New Hampshire to change the state to be more libertarian. 700 already have.
The fact that they can almost get people to move to a different state is evidence that they can get people to move to new man-made islands? Seasteading would be great, but actually getting it started looks really difficult.
You're calling your libertarian credentials into question there; a _real_ libertarian (for extreme values of real) would reply that you do, it's just that in New Hampshire the pirates call themselves the IRS and the Department of Revenue.
