now, what's wrong with a little imagination -- lying
back on an air mattress under a dome, on top of a
small island towed up from the Weddell Sea,
gazing at Cabo on the horizon from which nutrition
and friends arrive daily ... listening to your favorite
tunes on a steinway stereo (they start at about
$130k) and sipping on your favorite juice -- on ice?! -- j

p.s. http://www.steinwaylyngdorf.com/products...

Any ocean wave begins as a displacement of water - normally due to the frictional forces of wind, but occasionally by other displacement events such as rock slides or earthquakes. The displacement event forms a wave front, which has a speed and direction and may include multiple, individual wave pulses. The larger the displacement force, the more energy in the wave front. Generally, the period of the wave also indicates its power - the longer the period between waves, the greater the speed of the wave and hence the greater force.

When the wave is in water deeper than the wave's amplitude, the water can transmit the full force of the wave through the water. The problems begin when the wave hits "shoal" depth, ie the amplitude of the wave. Because in any wave front energy is conserved, there must be enough water in the wave front to carry the energy. Thus, the more quickly and further back the sea recedes prior to a wave, the more water is being taken into the wave front in order to propagate the energy in the wave front.

NOAA has some interesting tools here: (see http://nctr.pmel.noaa.gov/tsunami-foreca...)

So the consideration for any such floating city is the shoal depth. The oil rigs know this as well (pun intended), which is why they anchor themselves via a tether in really deep water (beyond the shoal depth for all but the most massive waves) and put their decks high above the reach of most other waves. If I were the planner, I would put as a permanent duo of city employees a meteorologist and a wavewatcher to go with a city engineer so they could constantly monitor for adverse weather conditions.

This is why I like the oil rig type approach. The oil rigs survive the hurricanes nicely, but we will have to have an air evacuation plan together.

Neat idea. Only one potential issue I didn't see addressed: Mother Nature. What happens when the inevitable hurricane crops up?

You don't need a gulch to strike. Millions of productive and creative people simply refuse to work for those who take the wealth we create without fair trade in a free market. Simply stop working for government contractors at every level. Stop working for banks, as they are de facto government dependents. Don't work in Gabling industries like stock brokers & insurance companies, and don't work for monopolies like government regulated utilities or their dependents like energy companies. Divest of all mortgaged real-estate, it indirectly benefits those same banks, governments, and parasites. Simply don't let your creative production be used by those who lack such ability. This is the essence of Galt's Gulch and Rand's Atlantis. Shangri-La is not an island in the sky, it is a place in your own mind, where you create justice and earn your living. Elysium is not a mythical place for elites to wonder what went wrong, but our birth right as productive citizens of the world. When you freely choose to join a collective, a corporation, a nation, you give up your right to your own labor, and sell out to those who control that group.

Like most instances of utopian-Libertarian thought, it's predicated on the assumption that bad guys don't exist, therefore there's no need to create and maintain a defensive military infrastructure.

The minute some nogoodnik with a sufficient naval force - or even a tango with a cheap submarine - decides that Atlantis X has a lot of goodies that it would like to have without buying, or that it's just an affront to Allah, well that's the end of Atlantis X.

I see nothing in this article about the inescapable problem of defense, and nothing any of the people quoted therein say indicates they've even considered the issue. If it were the year 1540 and the aquatic city-states were sufficiently fortified to repel galleon-class boats and cannonballs - yet somehow had present-day engineering technologies available - then the idea could work. But we're not living in Fantasyland, unfortunately. We're living in the looming specter of Islamofascism, Agenda 21 and global Orwellian collectivism.

Given an America restored to the general level of worldwide respect it had ca. 1950 and restored to the general level of Constitutional governance it had ca. 1776, the presence of a benevolent such superpower would allow for the advent of these kinds of things - but then, under those conditions most of the motivation to do it would also be removed because America itself would be much closer to the "Atlantis" ideal.
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How it is built is up to us.

Shivas' analysis is basically right. It would be essentially like an oil platform, I guess.

I think the submerged ridge idea is that you build the ridge up until it's above water at high tide. A man a made island that could be claimed as sovereign territory. Thomas Perry's novel "Island" from the late 80's hypothesized such a place. In that story the protagonist scuttled a couple of old large ships and dumped fill on top of them until he had created actual land. A cool idea, but I'm no engineer, so the practicality is out of my league.

Would they build a series of small structures all connected by bridges, or do they imagine starting with a large structure? It would be amazing if they built it, people thought it was a joke, and then became a hub of activity when valuable resources were found in the nearby trench.

If I learned the basics of writing, I could do better than maybe half the sci fi I've read on this topic, although that's only because some of it is really bad.

"For Friedman, the remaining barrier isn’t technical know-how or even the price tag -- $120 million to build the pilot, or about $530,000 a person. It’s persuading a nation to anchor a seastead in one of its inlets while granting it some degree of autonomy, before one day decamping for life on the open ocean."

There you have the rub. California and the US are not going to give up tax revenues to homesteaders or seasteaders. They would condemn your water system and force you to buy there's. The same for sewer and electric. No doubt there would HOA fees for seasteaders, and I'd bet the county/state would find a way to assess real estate taxes. That would be fun to watch, real estate tax on a place with no real estate. The truth is they do that in every State for mobile homes, they call it personal property tax. If you moved the colony out to sea far enough the States wouldn't care, then we lose the flexibility of travel, commerce, and pleasures of being close to the mainland.

I hear a cry in the wilderness for an Atlantis like place for all of us. I will stick me neck out and say it's right here, under our feet. We just have to develop the same kind of grit and courage the founders had and clean house. Sometimes we feel no one cares. I think when things get bad enough, changes will be made. Right now we are 5 months from elections and gas is $4, the economy shrank 1% in the first quarter, and it will continue on that path as ObamaCare and fuel prices sap more and more disposable income out of the economy. Both have the same impact as taxes, they remove purchasing power from the economy. People have been hurt in ways they don't even realize yet, but they will. They are making grocery and gas decisions to pay the new medical insurance premium, wait until they have a sick kid and have to pay the deductible too. Wait until corporations start trimming the cost of medical for 90,000,000 people. Last fall was just a rehearsal. Wait until the system matures, like the Veteran's Administration. Government employees making decisions that are not connected to outcomes. Corporate climbing with a government twist. When those things happen, a hurt and angery populace will be eager to clean house, and let freedom ring.

This is pretty doable... I'd enhance the design a little by anchoring it in shallow'ish water and tethering to an undersea structure as well, that would be a natural defensive position from storms / pirates / etc., while also increasing living space.. I'd have to think that lighting up the seabed around the structure, you could quadruple the going rate for a 'condo' on the seabed compared to top-side.

Those Seasteaders will have to form a naval alliance and acquire some flattops. Even then, defense will be very, very difficult.

Yes there is, and no McDonald's and no stop lights.

There is a fairly large swath that is about 20 meters deep.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Utopia

Lazarus Long (deceased in 2012) operated a "Web site to promote the so-called micronation tax haven, which he claimed was to be constructed on concrete platforms at the Misteriosa Bank 115 miles west of the Cayman Islands.[5][6][7] ". I then looked up Misteriosa Bank and found

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Misteriosa_...

The Misteriosa Bank is a submerged bank or atoll in the Caribbean Sea, located at WikiMiniAtlas
18°48′N 83°54′W / 18.800°N 83.900°W / 18.800; -83.900 – approximately equidistant from Mexico (380 km or 210 nmi), Honduras (345 km or 186 nmi) and Cuba (320 km or 170 nmi). The bank is 39 km (24 mi) long and 3 to 11 km (1.9 to 6.8 mi) wide. The area is 322 km2 (124 sq mi).[1] Immediately south of it is Rosario Bank. The closest piece of land is the Swan Islands, Honduras, 140 km (76 nmi) to the south and separated from it by the more than 5,000-metre-deep (16,000 ft) Cayman Trench. The reported depth is 20 metres (66 ft) on the average [5] or up to 22 metres (72 ft), with depths of 14–18 metres (46–59 ft) along the rim,[2] or 12.8–49 metres (42–161 ft) [6]. It is part of the Cayman Ridge.[3]

A buoy has been anchored to the seabed of this submerged peak of a sea mountain range that appears to have been claimed by the Principality of New Utopia. The placing of the buoy was filmed by a German film crew and broadcast by Arte television on satellite.

New Utopia maintains no state claims it, and wants to build a kind of micronation on top of it, using concrete blocks.

Charles Darwin's Coral Reefs mentions the Misteriosa Bank as an example of the sharply declining coral reef:

"Besides the coast-banks, there are many of various dimensions which stand quite isolated; these closely resemble each other, they lie from two or three to twenty or thirty fathoms [4 to 55 m] under water, and are composed of sand, sometimes firmly agglutinated, with little or no coral; their surfaces are smooth and nearly level, shelving only to the amount of a few fathoms, very gradually all round towards their edges, where they plunge abruptly into the unfathomable sea. This steep inclination of their sides, which is likewise characteristic of the coast-banks, is very remarkable: I may give as an instance, the Misteriosa Bank, on the edges of which the soundings change in 250 fathoms [460 m] horizontal distance, from 11 to 210 fathoms [20 to 380 m]..."

How fitting would it be for an AR community to be built on an underwater reef once discussed by Charles Darwin?!

I don't know a thing about maritime law, but wouldn't anything floating or fixed out on the ocean be subject to that law?

How deep is the ridge? I imagine if there were some natural resource that required people operating <= 100m under water, it could turn into an accidental Gulch, similar to what happened with the Americas.

I read a crappy Sci Fi book from the 60s about it. I can't find the title even in a DuckDuckGo search. Also Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy has Mars as his Gulch. He repeats the story in Antarctica. AJAshinoff shows the beginnings of a Gulch of sorts on Mars in Shadows Live Under Seashells. The thing is it's easier to build underwater than in space, and it's not at all easy to build in either place.

I hope a variety of these appear around the same time and come to challenge the very concept of the nation state.

Go for it, ISank.