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The real question with all these things is the common one: are you free to leave?

The frequently unspoken tenet of all modern governments and organizations, is that you are generally not free to leave (pandemic aside).

Every place as it's first defensive measures tends to the resort to the same idea: prevent people from leaving (so, take them prisoner). Because if people were truly free to leave, then good luck exploiting them.

For seasteading being free to leave is the core tenet, and not simply leave but also take your floating home with you, which is not possible on land.
As someone who left the US by car on a whim once: you were totally free to leave before covid.
This wasn't a criticism of the US. Look around the world at all the despotic regimes, or places with Dubai where you have a large population of migrant workers who have their passports seized.

The first basic tenet is throwing up barriers or blocking departure. The US doesn't really worry about people leaving - way more people want to enter then leave.

Seasteading has a very implicit hazard here though: there's an in-built ability to make leaving difficult (same with the mega-yachts and the like - when you happen to very rarely be in your employees home countries, you've created a rather effective barrier to them being able to depart).

I'd imagine restricting immigration would solve 99% of these problems. If someone wants to leave, then let them - it may just be hard to get back. If you have a place where the net desire is to leave, then you have problems that will not be solved by merely holding the passports of unwilling citizens.
I think similar issues would arise in space. I suspect living on a spaceship would be like being in prison
Very much so. Even with the best of intentions, the opportunity is going to be there and just way too easy to exploit.

Getting on a spaceship where it's an 8 month return journey from Mars, with alignments for transfer happening every 2 years, is going to be taking a hell of a risk with whoever control's the destination's intentions.

US and EU citizens could visit most places on a whim, but leaving and staying permanently elsewhere could be a lot more difficult -- even if you were an American who didn't want to go farther than Canada. (After Trump's election, there were more than a few Americans who found that a very unpleasant surprise, for some reason.)

And as we're seeing on the US southern border right now, the rules are very, very different for people who want to pick and leave, say, Guatemala.

There is a difference between "not being able to leave" and "not being able to enter", your examples are of second kind. Currently there are very few places that prevent people from leaving, e.g. North Korea, Turkmenistan, Xinjiang for Uighurs. East Germany and USSR in recent history.
Most countries have laws that strictly limit who can entry. What good is the theoretical freedom to leave, if there is no where to go?
Compare someone from Venezuela and North Korea. Millions of people managed to leave Venezuela and stay alive, unlike millions of people from North Korea who had died from hunger in 90s despite having neighbours ready to take care of them.

But if you think that there is nowhere to go, you need to support seasteading, because if it succeeds there will be many new countries that will be happy to take new citizens.

Does the perspective on the boundary matter if the end result is that you can't cross it?
And someone from Mexico? Venezuela?
Kinda sorta. Yes, you a free to run off to anywhere in the world. Your passport protects you even in hostile countries. However, you are expected to return home and pay taxes. To leave the United States is an expensive affair if you want to truly leave by giving up your citizenship. To work abroad is expensive too if the foreign country has a lower tax rate. As a US citizen you are free to roam, but never to change your home.
This. And I suspect the United States are amongst the easier places to leave, along with the European Union.

In both cases, the populace are free to roam and settle within the borders, but moving outside the borders is a whole different matter (with a few exceptions, but there are always exceptions).

Have they not seen cruise ships? I think they may be iterating on engineering problems that are largely solved.

If they want their own country, do it the old fashioned way and either declare independence or conquer one. This isn't an engineering problem, or rather, the only meaningful one involved is that of how to establish air superiority. The rest is economics and blackmail. Unexceptional people have been doing it for milennia.

It's pretty simple, you just say, "here are the new rules, and we regret to inform you that we intend to kill anyone who doesn't abide by them. However, here's some bread and circuses while you think it over." Probably even easier than reading half way through one of their tedious internet screeds I'd bet.

Yes, seasteaders are aware of cruise ships: https://www.seasteading.org/convert-cruise-ships-into-seaste....
> Can casting away from established society to inhabit sea-based colonies save us from the problems of modern life

No. (Well, OK, maybe in the short term, but certainly not in the long run.)

> or are we bound to repeat our mistakes?

Yes.

All of the major problems we face today are caused by people (and specifically, by too many people). Changing the venue is not going to solve any of those problems. If we can't achieve a sustainable steady-state on land we're not going to be able to do it on the water -- or anywhere else for that matter.

On a superyacht, problems are rather caused by too few people with power and too much money. We know all that, there's enough accounts on life on superyachts, and Peter Thiel still tries to sell us this stuff. It's like a supercharged company town, like construction sites in Dubai.
> and specifically, by too many people

"Too many" is relative to the available space and rate of resource production. The ocean is huge, so it will take us a while to fill the capacity, especially if we use genetic engineering to develop more food sources based on seaweed and algae. By the time we get to there, the 700 billion people living on Earth will surely develop new technologies to colonize other planets, and by the time we fill other planets something new will come.

If we try to stay at 7 billion forever, we'll have enough technology and economy to destroy all existing ecosystems, but not enough to restore and to invent more efficient ways of life. If you look at the history the greatest extinction we have caused so far was the extinction of megafauna caused by a very small number of people with very primitive technology.

So the only "sustainable steady-state" is constant expansion. The alternative is everyone dying from an asteroid like dinosaurs.

Except the dinosaurs didn't die. They survived and live among us still. We call them birds now.
You are technically correct (the best kind of correct), but the fact that some mammals will survive and live on after asteroid impact, will not be a consolation to billions of people who will die simply because there was too few of them to build functioning space economy capable of preventing the impact.
Don't know about the billions but I'd be consoled by it.
I think it's still stunning how much was lost in the mass extinction, and also how long it had been going at that point, timespans that totally boggle the mind!
we don't have enough tech and economy to make our way of life more sustainable? Au contraire, we simply lack the political willpower.
What are examples of tech that are not being used due to lack of political willpower?

Also note that if you have a working idea now that you can't realize because number of your supporters is low, as the number of well off people grows, number of your supporters will grow too, and something that was not possible to do with x people will become possible for 2x.

This is a well written article but I never really understood all the negativity around seasteading, it seems to bring out some serious antagonistic vibes from many people. The tone is summed up best in the last sentence.

> To fix the world, though, may require more humility and sacrifice.

The issue is that many recognise there is now no opt-out button on entrenched power structures that suffer from so much inertia, affecting change can take well over a human lifetime, even in liberal democracies. Once upon a time groups of people could pack up and leave for greener pastures when faced with oppression. That no longer exists and even worse popular sentiment amplified by the internet which actively seeks to disenfranchise such people:

* The Uyghurs wanted independence, hows that going?

* The resource rich Australian state of WA voted decisively to become an independent country but the Crown refused to allow it, the state now gets back $0.30 for every dollar of federal tax they collect.

* Catalonia independence vote got 92% support, it was declared unconstitutional by Spain and the EU.

This argument of fix the existing system simply doesn't work for many across the planet and falls apart quickly. Issues like gay marriage and marijuana decriminalisation have had majority support for decades before governments started paying attention. Plenty of people have potential solutions to many of societies ills, but those in power don't want these problems fixed. I think food aid during African famines is the most vivid illustration of this concept. There's enough food to make sure people die, but the people with the guns get the food from foreign donors then use it to only give to their own supporters and let their opposition die out. Despite being responsible for causing a famine, they actually end up stronger because of it.[1]

I congratulate all the people trying to experiment and find solutions to these problems. At least someone is trying, the arguments about it being a rich persons plaything or tax evasion are spurious and downright bizarre. The world could do with a few new small cities built from scratch, like all pioneering endeavours it's going to be horrible at first, but those who pave the way set the stage for many to follow.

[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01762...

> There's enough food to make sure people die,

Too late to edit. That obviously should be "make sure people don't die"

Gotta love Peter Thiel's faux patriotism, America First, etc. while also funding the early sea steading movement, designed with loopholes as a kind of separatist thing under minor nations' maritime flags.
From interviews, I don't think Thiel is, or ever has been a patriot. Nor do I think he ever pretended to be. He backed Trump because he's bullish on the nation-state, and his aims of greater self-sovereignty are in opposition to a more homogenous and coordinated global order.

Internationalist America has systematically crushed anything new that might pose a threat to the global order, something autonomous floating nations might do.

Bilateral America's self-interested realpolitik approach under Trump was much less interested in the state of the rest of the world, provided it gave the nation what it wanted (in theory, ofc. The foreign policy establishment did everything it could to maintain business as usual).