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.

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

Seasteads cost money, and if you want to succeed as a Seastead you have to find ways to attract people to move there. If I was a billionaire I wouldn't want to move to a seastead, but if I was a member of the bottom billion, most of whom want to leave their dysfunctional governments, I might want to move to a seastead.

Seasteads are a technology for anybody to form an alternative community based on their unique values - for communities to organize themselves however they want. Seasteads are their chance to demonstrate their vision can work. All that matters is that people can create, join, and leave seasteads voluntarily. As long as people can choose among seasteads, the best ways of living together will prosper, and the ones that people don't like will fail.

Seasteading could be the means by which humanity will live sustainably.

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.

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.