If seasteads advance blue-energy technologies, they'll create blue jobs. Millions of poor people living under exploitive governments are looking for a better choice. Seasteads won't attract them without offering them better options.

Seasteads are man-made islands that float permanently on the ocean with any measure of a political autonomy. They would essentially be startup societies where people could form whatever kind of community they wanted.

Americans are very mobile and move around and choose the communities they want. On the ocean people would be even more mobile and empowered to link up with people they enjoyed, and detach and move away from people they did not. Increasing choice is a way to foster fulfillment in people's lives. I choose my friends and I'd prefer to choose my neighbors too.

I think our children will be living on floating cities, and they will look back on the 20th Century, when people lived in primitive governments founded in previous centuries, and they will be living on modular, sustainable, floating cities that we can't imagine now, that are based on the voluntary choice of citizens. I think we will have a marvellous world in the 21st Century.

People can leave seasteads, or people can choose them, and people can create new seasteads if they want. This fluidity will engage an evolutionary market process that'll allow a diversity of societies to emerge that will in principle be superior, simply because people chose them. Governments on land don't allow this fluid dynamic of choice.

I'm a novelist and science writer. I wrote a book about human impacts on marine mammals caused by agricultural drainage of nutrients on our coasts, and another book about evolution. Seasteading captivated me because it incorporates both evolution and environmental restoration.

Once you provide people with a platform to start their own country, every conceivable type of innovator reaches out to you with their own idea.