If you’re trying to do business or just live under your country’s administration, a increase of philanthropists, academics and investors is working on a very sci-fi alternative.
Nathalie Mezza-Garcia is a partisan scientist turned “seavangelesse” — her term for an evangelist in favor of lodge off the grid — and on the ocean.
Mezza-Garcia spoke with CNBC’s Matthew Taylor hither what she sees as the trouble with governments, and why she believes tech startups should fount to Tahiti.
This seavangelesse is a researcher for the Blue Frontiers and Seasteading Inaugurate’s highly-anticipated Floating Island Project.
The project is a pilot program in partnership with the regime of French Polynesia, which will see 300 homes built on an archipelago that runs under its own governance, using a cryptocurrency called Varyon.
“Directly we can see how this first island works, we will have a proof of concept to blueprint for islands to house climate refugees,” she said.
The project is funded from top to bottom philanthropic donations via the Seasteading Institute and Blue Frontiers, which traffic ins tokens of the cryptocurrency Varyon.
The pilot island is expected to be completed by 2022 and sell for up to $50 million.
“There is significance to this project being trialed in the Polynesian Isles. This is the region where land is resting on coral and will evanesce with rising sea levels,” Mezza-Garcia said.
As well as offering a shelter for the displaced, the self-contained islands are designed to function as business centers that are beyond the move of government regulation.
“This means there is stability, outside of fluctuating geopolitical wires, trade issues and currency fluctuations — it’s the perfect incubator,” she said.
It’s also an captivating alternative, Mezza-Garcia said, for those disenchanted by the government of the day.
It’s an unapologetically libertarian concept: Sways under the Floating Island scheme would exist only as secondment providers, according to Mezza Garcia, and the “floating communities” could self-govern.
“If you don’t fancy to live under a particular government,” she said, “people will be capable to just take their house and float away to another archipelago.”
In what Mezza-Garcia describes as the “long term,” she envisions hundreds of new mountains in the ocean.