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Fantasy Island or Reality Island?
Throughout the nation, middle school students in the DiscoverE Future City competition use their imaginations to research, design, and build futuristic cities to showcase their solutions to sustainability issues. This kind of imaginative thinking may soon receive a real-life try out in a pilot project to create an innovative city that can handle rising sea levels caused by climate change.
The world’s first floating island project—Blue Frontiers—is being led by the Seasteading Institute, a nonprofit think-tank founded a decade ago in Silicon Valley to develop sustainable and resilient islands and cities, essentially civilizations on the ocean. Instead of homesteading on the prairie, “seasteading” is the frontier life on the sea.
The Seasteading Institute selected French Polynesia as its first seasteading location because the area is threatened by rising sea levels. Predictions estimate that one-third of the islands will be submerged by 2100. This floating island will use renewable energies and will be made of modular platforms designed to be autonomous, sustainable, and environmentally friendly. To minimize natural hazards, the island will float in a shallow lagoon area of Tahiti instead of the open ocean. The area is also away from active earthquake and volcano zones. The institute will be looking for investors and the use of innovative technologies to lower costs for the pilot project, which is estimated at $30–$50 million in US dollars.
The institute plans to use cost-friendly new materials to develop seasteads that are affordable for individuals and families with middle-class incomes. Island life would come with Internet and electric grid access, wastewater facilities, and fresh drinking water supplied using desalination technologies. The island will also be designed to have condominiums, apartments, offices, schools, medical facilities, shops and restaurants, museums, and cultural centers.
The institute envisions seasteading communities with professional opportunities for aquaculture, vertical farming, and scientific and engineering research in the areas of ecology, wave energy, medicine, nanotechnology, computer science, marine structures, and biofuels.
Read about the Blue Frontiers floating island projects.
