How is seasteading supposed to work legally?
This topic contains 11 replies, has 1 voice, and was last updated by 
tusavision 1 year, 7 months ago.
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i_is_j_smith wrote:
You’ll find that there is a lot of debate here on the forums about what “territory” is. That is the sticking factor. I agree that claiming “territory” on the seas is going to be a tough case to make.:
I’d like to clear that up, in law, precedent is supreme,
so let’s look at the origins of the word Territory:
etymonline.com wrote:
- territory
- early 15c., “land under the jurisdiction of a town, state, etc.,” probably from L. territorium “land around a town, domain, district,” from terra “earth, land” (see terrain) + -orium, suffix denoting place (see -ory). An alternative theory, somewhat supported by the vowels of the original Latin word, suggests derivation from terrere “to frighten” (see terrible); thus territorium would mean “a place from which people are warned off.” Sense of “any tract of land, district, region” is first attested c.1600. Specific U.S. sense of “organized self-governing region not yet a state” is from 1799.
Staying true to the original latin vowels, a territory is a place from which others (those unwelcome) are frightened or terrified by terrible people (military) into leaving.
So the Only and I repeat Only way we could actually have a territory, and also how Sealand managed to get a territory, is by terrifing tresspassers into leaving the area. Thereby we’d have to have some kind of weapons, preferable non-lethal (so the terrified could spread the word), such as sonic-weapons, smoke/light-illusion, and radio-jamming. Most people namely civilians are fairly easily frightened and so could easily be detered. We should of course warn people that they are tresspassing before enabling defensive measures.
Also consider that usually we’d want to attract people, it’s only certain parties who we deem “bad” which would have to be terrified into leaving. Such people could include tax-collectors, foreign military, and those which have been banished.
Of course if it’s some very large military, we might serve better to hide our location, and run away, preferably submerged. Though eventually, with large enough seastead islands, we’ll be able to take on even the largest land-based navy, as seasteaders we’d have more people, and more boats/submarines.
Big-boats may look menacing, but they are slow to maneuver, and so many small boats can over-whelm them, especially if some of those little boats are submarine welders. I read about a star-fleet battle simulator, and someone who won using evolutionary algorithms, the winning combination, was many small heavily-armoured boats with fairly light weapons, overwhelming with numbers, doing damage faster than a bulky vessel could take them out, along with some super-fast boats as escape pods for worst-case-scenarios, moving faster (in our case probably deeper) than the big-guns could aim at them.
It’s somewhat similar to how fire-ants can dissuade you from stomping on their territory, even though they are very small, they are hard to kill, and their bites can leave marks for days. black-ants are also good at thriving, even though they only bite in worst-case-scenarios like being cornered. Ants of course are so good at thriving since most of there nests are underground, so much of our seastead could be submerged.
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- territory
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