A Sanctuary Free of Regulations, Laws, and Moral Codes.

I would stop this before it's too late.

Before this is over they'll have Big Daddies patrolling the place and Little Sisters sucking the blood out of the corpses.

Eh, we can just wait until the island fills up with people dumb enough to think this will work. Isolate it and wait for them to kill each other off. At the very least it should clean up the gene pool a little.

edited 16th Aug '11 3:46:42 PM by Rationalinsanity

I think alot of people would not be interested in this place and write it off the bat.I think what it should be turned into a sanctuary for hungry orphan children from around the world.Come on that would be a great idea.

And? The reality is that Bioshock overemphasized how durable a Big Daddy would be. In real life, it would be trivial to utterly destroy the entire Big Daddy army.

They don't pose a threat to anyone but themselves. Good riddance, I say.

edited 16th Aug '11 4:22:41 PM by USAF713

And to think all the good that could be done with that money.

Oh well, watching it collapse will make for some entertainment.

5 years before everyone on the place is dead. And that's the optimist in me, the pessimist say 47 minutes.

I know what this looks like, it looks like Eve Online in real life and by god that is a stupid idea.

They didn't say anarchism, they said libertarianism. Even in Libertarianism you have some law and order, and some rules, just not tons of them.

I wouldn't mind living on one of these if the process was actually refined a bit.

You make too many assumptions about how good they would be at accomplishing anything that isn't "legalize everything and have a party!"

Some people tried to do this back in the 70s but it got annexed by Tonga.

(laughing) Oh ho ho this is gonna be good.

I'll get my lawnchair, popcorn, and rum to watch how this island works out.

Once it's done I say we mobilize the tvtropes forces and conquer it for our own ends.

But we must censor the Plasmids. Don't want everyone turning into Axe-Crazy addicts with psychic powers.

@Big Daddies being useless- They wouldn't hold up against an organized army, but against one person they'd be really scary.

Big Sisters on the other hand...

And here I thought this topic would be about Somalia. Silly me.

I really hope this island idea comes to fruition, if only because it'll be damned hilarious to watch it burn itself to the ground.

This should be fun to watch.

Though it certainly would be sad if some group of people sail over and take the place over for themselves...

... And that one caught on fire, fell over, and sank into the swamp. So I built another and...

Then they make a horrible movie about the situation and get two of the worst actors to play the main characters.Worst of all you will rooting for the villian when they want to push them off the island to the sharks.

Couldn't he just buy some land from some government with that money nonetheless?

But you know, let these losers do what they want.

"So what did he do?"

"Oh he invented Paypal, but he died in 2011."

"How?"

"Oh, he invented some weird island and the first thing they did was shoot him because he didn't offer any other payment choices."

Well I'm happy to see them try this; I've been following the seasteading folks from afar for some time, and they have some nice ideas.

You can also check out their (admittedly pretty empty) website instead of second-hand news sources - it looks like it's mostly just going to be a boat, like those luxury Yachts that have enough to support a comfortable life on board.

Also - Bioshock is fiction. It's not any more indicative of how things would work out in real life than science fiction shows from the fifties were indicative of how the world would be now. Fiction is biased in systematic ways, towards what makes a good story, toward what is understandable by modern audiences, etc.

Slightly Evil Doctor, if you honestly believe this will end well, I hope you never go into politics.

I'm not sure how they're going to prevent this island from sinking from bad building code. (Or the complete lack of it)

No, people don't seriously think libertarianism will create mutant cyberpunk monsters. But they don't think it will be any more successful in forming a viable society than it was in Bioshock, either.

If it does fail to crash and explode, then it will be solely because major financial interests choose to control it with an iron fist.

I don't know if it will go well, but neither does anybody who hasn't done a good deal of research about what they plan to do, how, and how often similar things have been tried in the past (and similar as in deep similarities, not superficial ones).

What makes the Silicon Valley work isn't fundamentally impossible to do on a boat - high tech software companies, or finance companies don't require that much in terms of infrastructure (compared to a lot of classical industry and agriculture, that involve shipping a lot of physical stuff around), though it isn't fundamentally impossible to do in the middle of Kazakhstan either, and there's no Silicon Valley in Kazakhstan.

The concept of making a business-friendly free-market oriented place has worked in the past, at a small scale: look at Hong Kong and Singapor. Something even smaller has it's chance.

And even if this particular project doesn't turn into pure awesomeness like Hong Kong and Singapore did (and I agree that's pretty darn unlikely), it may prove to be a worthwhile experiment for figuring out what works and what doesn't.

I like the general idea of having a lot of small new states experimenting with better governance. I don't know if those would work better on land or on sea, but just the fact that some people are experimenting is encouraging.

The reason they can't just buy land from a government is that they hope to live outside of the legal jurisdiction of any country.