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(Check out our complete collection of Underwater and Oceanic Oddities.)
Who hasn’t imagined living on their very own floating paradise? For those aboard ResidenSea, a permanent ocean-going residence, this dream is at least a partial reality. Freedom Ship (upon its completion) will take floating cities to a new level and if the Living Universe Foundation has its way the oceans will just be a first stop on the humanity’s path to the stars. This collection is roughly sequenced from most practical (but also most mundane) to most extraordinary (but also least plausible)!
ResidenSea is a (perhaps unsurprisingly) Florida-based company that manages the world’s only mobile and full-time floating luxury community called The World. Think of this as a cruise ship - but on serious steroids. While this project doesn’t claim micronational status it is essentially completely independent of any location. Prices are predictably high, ranging from 2.5 to 7.5 million dollars to own on-board condo spaces. Activities and amenities on board include swimming pools, restaurants, tennis courts, a library, health spa, fitness center and even golf greens. Sure, it sounds a lot like a cruise ship, but it is also a full-time residence (and even tax haven) for many on-board owners. Still, if it isn’t exciting enough, the Freedom Ship (next paragraph) sure should be.
The Freedom Ship project is a serious step up from ResidenSea but also unbuilt as of yet, though 1/5 of the on-board living units have already been sold. The concept? A mile-long, energy self-sufficient floating city with absolutely everything included from parks and playgrounds to apartments, businesses, schools, casinos and shopping malls. It will also be fully networked for phone and internet communications. Rather than docking, aircraft will land to resupply the ship and deposit and pick up residents. At 25 stories high the ship would accommodate 40,000 full-time residents and 60,000 total occupants. More than a floating paradise this is designed to be a fully functioning and essentially autonomous city of relatively uniform architecture. Though funding is still needed, signs still point to the eventual completion of this ocean-going wonderland.
The Living Universe Foundation is a strange organization dedicated to the long-term colonization of the galaxy. In the long term, they envision humans tapping into the vast natural resources outside of planet Earth - from the sun’s energy (of which we get only a tiny fraction of course) to vast mineral deposits on nearby asteroids. In the short term, however, they believe that a series of self-sufficient, semi-autonomous ocean-going cities are the first step on this eight-step journey to galactic conquest. What are to start as sea-faring colonies would form the basis for future space journeys as these semi-independent enclaves could then be transported to the stars as units. Power would be generated by taking advantage of the temperature differentials at the water’s surface versus the deeps. The sea-borne populations would subsist on sea life and tourist trade and the urban design (shown above) would be based in part on managing water navigational issues. The first step in this project? Apparently, the foundation has started with a land-based colony in Texas with one resident in a trailer.
The Celestopia Project is a broad-scoped attempt at colonizing the Earth’s oceans one settlement at a time. According to one source, Celestopean Elemental Separators will (apparently) allow them to mine the ocean’s waters for not only “hydrogen and oxygen” but also for “platinum and gold.” Their more moderate homepage suggests they will use Thermal Energy Converters (OTECs) to harvest power from temperature differentials in the ocean. Life on these oceanic colonies will involve age-extending health practices and domed residences that will be resistant to the forces of nature. Each such floating city will be designed to house 5,000 to 10,000 people and these will slowly cover the surfaces of all of the Earth’s oceans.
So where did this all start? As with many present utopian ideals and building strategies a surprising number of philosophical ideas, building strategies and ecological approaches embodied in the aforementioned floating utopian concepts date back to the famous environmentalist, scientist, designer, philosopher and visionary Buckminster Fuller. In the 1960s he developed a design for something known as Triton City
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12 Comments
March 9th, 2008 at 4:12 pm
I’d like to know what kind of effect on the ecosystem any of these would have.
March 10th, 2008 at 9:26 am
I like this World concept of autonomous city. Might turn out to be one of the last options for some of us here in the middle east LOL. seriously. there are so many wars over land. this kind of thinking can solve large parts of the problem. guess it just a little bit too expensive…
March 10th, 2008 at 4:53 pm
Someone would just soot the place up, ruin some lives, have some coffee
March 10th, 2008 at 10:42 pm
Interesting concepts.
I think they are too monolithic to be sustainable.
A huge ship or a floating island would be an easy target for a hurricane.
March 11th, 2008 at 4:13 am
What’s the point? You’ll still be living with thousands of other people, it only takes one bad apple etc.
March 11th, 2008 at 2:20 pm
Patri Friedman of seastead.org here. Thanks for the link. I find it rather odd that you include ResidenSea, which is a real ship out there cruising right now, in the same category as the Freedom Ship, which has as much chance of raising the $10,000,000,000 needed as I have of winning the lottery. (I don’t buy lottery tickets, by the way). Same goes for LUF. If you are going to include real things, why not SeaLand?
Anyway, you can find an extensive review of ocean city projects here:
http://seastead.org/commented/paper/review.html
And my diss of the Freedom Ship, w/ collected thoughts by others about its ridiculousness, here:
http://patrifriedman.com/proje.....mship.html
March 23rd, 2008 at 11:32 pm
wow…that’s really amazing..
May 23rd, 2008 at 5:34 pm
I’d like to offer some corrections for the info on the Living Universe Foundation. The LUF (originally known as the First Millennial Foundation but forced to change it’s name because of state bureaucrats’ aversion to the word ‘millennial’ on NPO application forms…) was inspired by the book The Millennial Project by Marshal Savage; a futurist space-advocacy work akin to the classic space advocacy books like Robert Zubrin’s Entering Space and Gerard O’Neill’s The High Frontier. The basic premise of TMP is the step-wise development of space beginning with the equatorial oceans as a source of vast renewable energy to support a concerted space development effort and a location to cultivate a Post-Industrial culture in some isolation from the consumerism and vested interests of the dominant western Industrial Age culture.
In the original concept, this marine phase of colonization -dubbed Aquarius- was to be based on the creation of a series of coast eco-villages that would cultivate the necessary technology for constructing full-scale marine settlements based on the Hilbertz electrolytic sea accretion process and using electric power from OTEC plants that would ultimate be used to power the finished colonies, provide them with fresh water, provide upwelling nutrients for mariculture, and export its vast surplus energy to land communities. Surplus power would also be provided to the Bifrost mass accelerator; an electric powered launch system originally planned to be built on Mt Kilimanjaro. Aquarius settlements were also intended to function as space centers for glide-landing Bifrost LEO vehicles based on ‘waverider’ type lifting body hull designs. There is nothing in the Aquarius phase plan relating to marine navigation -other than as a side-line to colony telecom facilities, the development of a down-range telemetry facilities, and, of course, the ability to launch new commercial satellites.
The image of the cellular island structure is the original Aquarius colony design proposed my Savage. The other image is, in fact, the Nexus mobile marine colony designed by Eugene Tsui and which, though similar in that it is based on the same construction technology and energy source, has no actual relation to TMP. The Nexus Project is remarkable in its own right, though its basis in extremely large scale free-form organic architecture is a bit fanciful given the limitations of current engineering and the nature of the Hilbertz process.
The Texas property with its solitary trailer resident was a largely independent attempt by several LUF members to found a preliminary eco-village project with something of a ‘build it and they will come’ premise. It was intended to develop an assortment of sustainable architecture as a means of cultivating interest and a building skill-base among members. Unfortunately, the scrublands of central Texas did not exactly fit the notions of upward mobility for the majority of the LUF’s American middle-class membership and the lack of relevance to most of the development activities expected for TMP was a point of contention. Thus the experiment was short-lived and the site abandoned.
Currently, I am personally working on an update of the original plans and concepts of TMP using a wikia site can can be seen here;
http://tmp2.wikia.com/wiki/Main_Page
Over time many of the original concepts in TMP have become anachronistic as some ideas proved infeasible (the Hilbertz process have been revealed to be something of a hoax) and technology, the global logistical situation, and trends in contemporary futurist thought evolve and thus the original program was in need of radical revision and update. One critical flaw in Savage’s original planning was the idea of coastal eco-villages as they would have demanded use of some of the scarcest and most expensive real estate in the world. The current Aquarius plan calls for the incremental development of marine settlements starting with small near-shore floating eco-communities built with current ferrocement houseboat foundation systems and then transitioning to larger scale concrete Pneumatically Stabilized Platforms as developed by Float Inc. and proposed for such applications as coastal airports. These ’seed’ settlements would start in convenient near-urban bay locations then migrate slowly to the equator as their populations and infrastructure grew to support progressively more sophisticated and longer range public transportation with increasingly large economies of scale. Current colony designs are varied but likely approaches would employ contemporary Modernist prefab architecture with early seed settlements (owing to their potential for rapid reconfiguration) while full colonies are likely to employ some variation of a ‘tectonic’ architecture that simulates stylized natural landscapes using a garden terraced structure akin to topographic maps or the terraced farms of Asia and Peru with most habitation integrated into/under the perimeter edge of each terrace.
Once on the open sea, these settlements would be able to deploy OTEC systems, industrial-scale mariculture, and engage in concerted space development based on conventional marine launched rocketry, eventually developing a new alternative to the original Bifrost in the form of Space Elevator tether systems that use the marine colonies as their ‘downstation’ facilities. Just as large urban centers tend to emerge at strategic points of intermodal transit exchange, the Aquarian colonies would grow into large marine cities serving as one side of a direct bridge to space and a settlement developed there as an ‘upstation’ gateway to other destinations in orbit and the rest of the solar system.
Of course, all this is a plan of generations. Near term, these communities are intended to simply offer better, more novel, greener, and healthier places to live, encourage the development of a comprehensive renewable energy infrastructure on Earth, fight Global Warming through the carbon sequester potential of OTEC and the burgeoning hydrogen economy, pursue large scale mariculture as a global food source, pursue commercial space activity, and develop emerging sustainable and Post-Industrial technologies. Y’know, all those things western civilization would be doing if they actually still believed in the future…
June 18th, 2008 at 10:41 am
It looks nice, till the wind picks-up and three sisters waves occur.
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