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.

A lot of Pacific island nations are sinking below sea level; they could easily transition slowly into becoming floating nations.

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.

Oil platforms are a technology for floating permanently on the high seas, and cruise ships are a technology for self-governance on the high seas, and if you combine these two technologies, imagine cruise ships that never dock but float permanently. Imagine if they were 10 times as big. Imagine if they were modular and could move about and you could choose the neighbours you wanted to live with.

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.

That's the marvellous thing about seasteads; if a government fails, there's nothing much the people who live there can do about it. But if seasteads fail, they simply disassemble and go away.

We're going to draw a new map of the world, with French Polynesia as the centre of the Aquatic Age.