Peter Thiel Makes Down Payment on Libertarian Ocean Colonies  By
Alexis Madrigal Email 05.19.08 An artist's conception of what a
large seastead based on the spur design could look like. The
Seasteading Institute envisions vast clumps of these structures
forming city-states in the open ocean. Illustration: Valdemar
Duran       Within the pantheon of would-be utopian communities,
there's a particularly rich history of people trying to live
outside the nation-state paradigm out in the ocean. The most
ambitious was Marshall Savage's Aquarius Project, which aimed at
nothing less than the colonization of the universe. There was
also Las Vegas millionaire Michael Oliver's attempt to create a
new island country, the Republic of Minerva, by dredging the
shallow waters near Tonga. And the Freedom Ship was to be a
mile-long portable country costing about $10 billion to
construct.  None of these projects has succeeded, a fact that
The Seasteading Institute's founders, Google's Patri Friedman
and the semi-retired Wayne Gr