Thinking about seasteading requires us to free ourselves of these broad political categories we're stuck with on land. People can make whatever community system they want on a seastead. What emerges will totally defy the broad categories we debate about now.

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.

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.

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.

Evolution is variation and selection. If you can vary alternatives, and select among them, improvement emerges. It works in technology, in apps, and in life itself. What stunned me about seasteading is that it's a technology for variation and selection in governance itself. The reason some two hundred nation-states do a poor job of governing seven billion people is that they don't vary, and people don't select.