A Growing Population: Means More Residential Space Needed

In the last hundred years the combination of better healthcare which allows more babies to grow up, become adults and reproduce and increasing expected footprint of homes has meant that we are quickly using up the available land. For example in the United States although the size of the average family has been decreasing, the size of the average home has been increasing.

Forward thinkers like Elon Musk and SpaceX are charging ahead trying to develop shuttle service to space which they hope will allow humans to in the not too distant future colonize space. But the challenges of colonizing space are huge not only must we improve the transportation systems back and forth but find ways to breathe and grow food there. So in the meantime, the reality is that more and more society is finding itself having to look inside earth’s atmosphere for if not the next frontier then at least an interim place to live.

On earth the space challenges of obtaining oxygen to breathe and food to eat are non-issues. Nonetheless if we want to co-exist with other species we have just about maxed out our footprint on land; which means that we must now expand onto the over seventy percent of the earth’s surface that is water.

People may not agree but just as the early western United States was originally privatized by the early settlers, the next wave of settlers are already moving to the next earthly frontier the water. Worldwide more and more people are living on the water and this trend doesn’t even consider the impacts of rising sea levels and declining water tables which lead to land subsidence. Think of all the floating communities worldwide either already in existence or in the process of being built: Amsterdam, Hong Kong, London, Sausalito and even Redwood City.

Almost one hundred and fifty years ago Jules Verne, wrote about year around life on the Nautilus in his classic “Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas.” While at the time he only imagined a submarine type style of underwater home, modern technology has already made deep sea platforms a reality. Currently deep sea platforms are really the province of oil companies but there is no nothing that says that these deep sea platforms cannot instead be used for residential purposes. In fact based right out of Oakland, the Seasteading Institute is already hard at work at these type of residential structures.

What is the point of all of this? The reality is that like the lands of the early United States wild west that were originally for all intents and purposes public trust lands, the waters of the world are quickly being privatized both for commercial and residential use.