The Maldives are Soon to Become the World’s First Floating Country

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(Edited)




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In what many have long regarded as an inevitability, the government of the Maldives announced recently an ambitious plan to establish floating streets, neighborhoods and associated infrastructure within the natural breakwaters furnished by the shape of the islands in that chain.


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As the nation closes to sea level, the Maldives are expected to be immersed by a slowly rising tide, which poses an existential threat to a nation based entirely on a string of very flat islands already just barely above the water line. However as is often the case, behind this disaster there are hidden opportunities.



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The Maldives survive entirely off revenue from wealthy tourists. This is how they’re able to afford the lion’s share of the world’s scant number of underwater attractions, such as restaurants, hotel rooms and spas. The Ithaa, Subsix, Lime Spa and the Muraka are some examples.

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Underwater habitat space comes at a steep premium. This is a government with deep pockets relative to its above-water surface area. They can certainly afford to move their citizenry onto floating platforms, and the silver lining is that being the world’s only floating nation will only increase its novelty appeal to tourists.



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There is after all a nontrivial overlap between the type of millionaires and billionaires interested in vacationing someplace like the Maldives, and the seasteading crowd. The Maldives will be the world’s first proper large scale experiment in seasteading.



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It also may be the only one for a very long time. Their situation is special; the Maldives consists of a series of atolls, ring-shaped masses of land and coral with a depression in t he middle, like barely submerged craters. Even as the sea level begins covering up the land, because it rises nearly to the surface it will continue to act as a naturally occurring breakwater.


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For those not versed in the architectural principles of seasteading, there are a few types. Spar style seasteads borrow the principles already in use by floating oil rigs to survive sometimes violent open ocean weather conditions via their inherent buoy-like stability. They’re unavoidably an ugly industrial looking affair, however.


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If you’d rather have more picturesque floating cities consisting of modular, interconnecting platforms like you’ve probably seen lovely renders of on futurist or architectural blogs, you need a breakwater to disrupt incoming waves. Otherwise the brutal fury of open ocean storms will absolutely wreck your shit in no time flat.



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The problem being that the breakwater is by far the largest and most expensive part of your seastead. An awfully steep price of entry, just to create a calm lagoon in the open ocean. Then there’s the ongoing maintenance costs. It doesn’t really make sense to do it this way just for aesthetics. But if you get your breakwater for free, the equation changes substantially.



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Certainly a bummer for those of us that like to daydream about colonizing the blue frontier. But at the same time, another feather in the cap of the Maldives government: This fortuitous happenstance means they will, perhaps for a very long time, have a monopoly on the kind of attractive, bespoke modular platform cities that fans of seasteading yearn for. It is an approach not possible to replicate anywhere else in the world without breaking the bank.

For the rest of us, the future aquatic will have to wait. But for the citizens of the Maldives and anybody with enough disposable income to visit, that future will arrive somewhat ahead of schedule.







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3 comments
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I would imagine a solar still could even handle the fresh water needs of an island community like that, and of course fishing could handle much of the food needs.

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Looks like the Millennium Falcon a bit

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It's impressive what the human mind will come up with when faced with a major dilemma. The two choices are complete destruction of the whole country/community in a few years, relatively speaking, or building and thriving. It makes me want to go there just to see it for myself and to support it. Thank you!

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