Why Introduction

We hope that many readers will immediately see the appeal of tackling humanity’s next frontier, but we some may be mystified, asking: “Why would anyone want to go live on the ocean?” Until you understand why this will make the world better, the details will be of little interest. So we’ll start by answering these questions:

1. Why should we seek to create new societies at all? What’s wrong with the ones we have?
2. Why seastead - is the ocean really the best place to experiment with new societies?
3. Why seastead using our approach?

We’ll answer them in very different ways, however:

1. We’ll mainly punt on this. After all, who doesn’t get frustrated sometimes with government or politicians? Instead of discussing the failures of democracy in detail, we’ll just provide some brief evidence that many different groups are dissatisfied with current societal options and looking for a new frontier to try new things. We’ll also provide some references for those interested in digging into the details of why government so often works so poorly.

2. Here is where we believe we can make a real contribution, with a new way of looking at government efficiency which suggests simple reasons why politics sucks now and how it can be made to suck less. This theory suggests that the ocean-based societies can have the least sucky governments the world has ever seen. However, they must leverage the ocean’s unique qualities, otherwise they will fall into the same pitfalls as current countries.

3. While we will have plenty to say here, none of it will be very profound. It’s merely the application of common sense to an area (founding new countries on the ocean) where it has been sadly lacking. Still, while our approach seems obvious to us, each of our tenets has been broken by other projects, so we feel it’s worth laying them out!