The following essay appears in the book, "Viable Utopian Ideas", Edited by Arthur B. Shostak, Drexel University. This is the final edited version for the book, which was published in the Spring of 2003. As noted in the footnote at the bottom, the full version of the essay will (eventually) be appearing on the Reality Sculptors website. Contact me if you want more and feel that I should make it a priority. :-) Patrick Salsbury November 05, 2003 ------------------ The First Edition of the book is on-line at http://www.utopianideas.net/ Patrick Salsbury January 15, 2003 ------------------ The First Edition of the book is on-line at http://www.utopianideas.net/ Patrick Salsbury January 15, 2003 ------------------ Distributed Floating Cities: A Laboratory for Exploring Social Utopias Patrick G. Salsbury As explained by the author - "This essay proposes a novel approach in the attempt to find one or more versions of utopia: A distributed matrix of hundreds or thousands of cities that float on the oceans, holding physical life-support technologies and high standards of living constant across all cities, and making slight variations in the social fabric from city to city, based on local resident preference. This is not so much a blueprint for any one utopia, but rather, a plan for a testing laboratory to allow individual people and whole societies to find their own versions of utopia using the scientific method on a grand scale. ----------------------- Given severe space constraints the editor put on all of the volume's essay, I cannot attempt to convince you of the possibility of building a floating city, nor go into the technical details of how to accomplish this. (1) Please - take my word that it *is* possible to build hundreds or thousands of floating cities and scatter them across the oceans of the planet. Why bother? Because they put a buffer of several hundreds or thousands of miles of ocean between differing ideologies, so we can hopefully avoid the sort of frictions brought about by close proximity. My general idea is to let people of a similar mind live near one another. A major difference between floating cities and traditional landlocked cities is that once land cities become established and grow to their respective boundaries, they really aren't going anywhere. They've reached maturity, although they continue to age. Eventually, some areas get run down, and go through stages of "urban renewal". My floating city model, however, offers a radical departure. The design is based upon a simple biological model that has been in use for billions of years: cell division. As a sea-based city grows, it will draw energy and nutrient resources from the sun, wind, and sea. It will produce more physical area for its growing population, and more economic opportunities. However, unlike a landed city, a floating city can self-replicate, then split apart. It can go through a process of "budding" to produce smaller "seed colony" copies of itself, and these may split off and float away in a new direction, both physically and ideologically. Rather than letting a city grow beyond its social or physical carrying capacity, and suffering through waves of crime, unemployment, social dissension, or overcrowding, the people of a floating city can simply start a new colony at sea (or on land) according to their new definition of a utopian goal. The implications of this are fairly profound. No more need for wars of Independence. No more need to fight over occupied "zones of control". No more fighting over so-called "holy land", since a floating city will likely be drifting around. No need for rebels fighting against powers-that-be. Just an amicable shaking of hands, and a few thousand like-minded individuals hop onto a seed colony, and head out to see if they can make their idea of utopia work. The general idea is to create a controlled laboratory environment, where you hold most of your variables constant, and change just a few things. In this case, we attempt to hold life-support and living standards constant (and high) for all people. In a biology lab, it's common to see dozens or hundreds of Petri dishes with the same substrate of nutrients, while some other factor is manipulated in a controlled fashion. In this proposed planet-wide sociology lab, the "Petri dishes" would simply be large scale floating cities that were each home to somewhere between 5,000 and 150,000 people. Once adequate life-support needs have been established at a high standard of living for all people, everywhere, one can no longer blame continuing social failings on poverty, inequity, and so on. The ideas that knit together the individual societies may then be examined in a rigorous way, and we can begin to explore the ideologies that either make a society function well, or don't. In this thought-experiment, "high standard of living" could not be defined as "the way many Americans live today", for that would spell ecological disaster when replicated across the globe and across billions of people. Rather, in this case, we should strive for a standard of living *higher* than common in America, or other industrialized nations. We need to create environments where everyone has enough personal space, food, water, sanitation, energy, shelter, education, health, and time to pursue their ideas of fulfillment and growth. This should be done *without* being wasteful, *without* polluting the environment, and while utilizing the latest advances in technology and knowledge to actually repair the damage done to the planet during the 20th Century. (Sounds utopic, doesn't it?) Once you've got the physical infrastructure of a few of these self-supporting, eco-friendly floating cities in place, you can then begin to make slight variations in social structure, and can explore controversial issues that have proven complicated in the uncontrolled, often very densely populated environments of current cities, states, and nations. Would you like to live in a certain type of political system? Or a specific religion? (Or no religion?) What about guns? Legal or no? Drugs? Abortion? Race? Gender? Sexual Orientation? How about a community made up of a people with a similar so-called "disability"? A city where most people are in wheelchairs, or are deaf, will differ greatly from one where most can walk and hear. An all-gay city, a city of gun owners, a city of legal drug users ... Suddenly, these people who are used to being a marginalized minority find that they are the majority. How will that change their society? Will they be able to achieve their vision of utopia without the oppressive yoke of that has kept them down for centuries? Or will they become oppressors themselves? (Hopefully not.) A crucial thing to keep in mind during this thought experiment is that participation in this proposed laboratory environment is *completely voluntary*! This isn't a proposal for concentration camps where minorities of whatever sort are forced to go off and live with "their own kind." But rather a haven where they may flock by choice, to be with people of similar mindsets. The goal is to reduce friction as much as possible by letting each group pursue their own ideas of utopia, without the interference of detractors. Of course, anyone who doesn't want to go may continue to live in our current societies and land-based cities. This isn't a plan to replace the existing world, just to expand the options and possibilities for those in the world. Some people may question the idea of going off to live in a place where everyone agrees with you, and insist that it's better to stay and fight for your "rights" in the place where you're unhappy. Not only does this leave you unhappy, but it's also liable to make the other people unhappy. Two groups of unhappy people do not a utopia make. Each society will have its own local Constitution with the rules of that group. To make sure that everyone in any given city is still pretty happy with what they've signed up for, there should probably be some sort of mandatory "happiness index" recheck every year, if not more frequently. Perhaps a system where each citizen (which will probably vary with age based on different societies) is required to sign and renew their adherence to the local Constitution yearly. In essence, they are signing the "Social Contract" that we often hear about, but usually never see in our current societies. Times change, people change, laws change. What sounded like a great idea a few years ago might not actually be so good in practice. For example, perhaps you have a family now, and all those guns everywhere in the Free-Gun Society are making you nervous. If you're not happy, then you're not in your personal utopia, and under the provisions of "The Floating Cities Experiment", you should be able to pursue your happiness elsewhere. It may be another floating city, or it may be back on the mainland. There should be some sort of "travel agency" service that can help you find what you're looking for. If everything in your current location is perfect, except for the guns, then maybe you need city #429, rather than #287 where you are now. Socially identical, but no guns. Will letting people live their dream lead to social failure? Possibly. In fact, in some cases, probably, which is a valuable thing to know. For example: A city of 50,000 democratic, pro-drug, pro-choice, anti-gun, people might thrive, while a city of 50,000 communist, pro-drug, pro-choice, pro-gun people might not. Holding other things steady, we have two variables. Was it the Communism or the guns that caused one city to fail? Or some combination of both? Even if (or *especially* if) some cities don't make it, this will be useful information for the rest of humanity. Specifically, in the next 50-100 years as we begin to move off the planet and out into space. This utopian testing lab will hopefully provide pointers into what sorts of social systems tend to produce extremely happy people, only so-so people, or extremely disgruntled people. And that information might mean the difference between life and death when a ship carrying 100,000 people or more is heading off into the interstellar Void. It should also prove useful to people still living here on Earth. Bio: Patrick Salsbury is a Design Scientist living in the San Francisco Bay Area. He works on creating solutions for social problems such as traffic congestion, homelessness, poverty, hunger, water shortage, and poor education. He is the Founder of Reality Sculptors -- http://reality.sculptors.com/ _______________________________________________________ Footnote: 1.These are topics covered in more depth on the floating-cities mailing list and the Reality Sculptors website at http://reality.sculptors.com/ - where you can find archives of past discussions, or join in future ones. This essay will also be further expanded on the website.