This showed up in  my twitter timeline recently.

http://gizmodo.com/the-techno-islands-that-may-replace-the-maldives-1704872022

Now I don’t actually believe that the Maldives are being submerged by rising sea levels caused by global warming. Still the idea of repurposing old drilling platforms as seasteads is interesting.  They might interesting places to live.  Though living would be, by necessity, be confined in some ways. Larhe apartments and spaces are going to be rare, for instance.

http://www.seasteading.org/community/contests/design-contest-winners/

http://www.wired.com/2015/05/silicon-valley-letting-go-techie-island-fantasies/

https://reason.com/blog/2013/12/27/seasteading-new-nations-becomes-a-practi

Still there aren’t really any showstoppers. Huge ocean structure are already being fabricated for oil drilling and production.  People live on them for long periods of time.  It’s likely that offshore structures for various activities are going to get larger in the near future.

https://theartsmechanical.wordpress.com/2016/03/29/building-the-largest-structures/

http://www.shell.com/about-us/major-projects/prelude-flng.html

Not just oil and gas, but mining as well

https://theartsmechanical.wordpress.com/2015/09/21/about-that-ocean-mining/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_sea_mining

http://www.abc.net.au/catalyst/stories/3240156.htm

New technologies are making possible to grow vegetables very efficiently.

http://weburbanist.com/2016/02/02/veggie-factory-worlds-first-vertical-farm-fully-run-by-robots/

People are also developing new ways to farm the ocean.

Who knows where it’s going to lead.  Even without the supposed AGW catastrophe seasteading might become no different than any other minerals town. It might even move like the town in Gargantia.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gargantia_on_the_Verdurous_Planet

http://www.fandompost.com/2014/07/04/gargantia-on-the-verdurous-planet-ova-gets-first-promo-images/

http://suisei-no-gargantia.wikia.com/wiki/Hideauze

With advancing genetic and regeneration technologies they might even reinvent themselves to better suit the ocean environment, though I doubt that they would turn themselves into giant space squids.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3396624/Webbed-feet-cat-s-eyes-gills-Features-just-humans-evolve-deal-water-world-global-warming-second-ice-age.html

 

 

 

Living at sea has some exciting potentials and the possibility of a new kind of living. Only though if we create the fertile ground that lets pioneering like this happen. Otherwise we risk the kind of world like the one  that Poul Anderson came up with in Orion Shall Rise.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orion_Shall_Rise