Again, limited to locations that are already sheltered bays or have some other structures providing this shelter. Under normal sea conditions a lashed-together collection of ships will grind each other to bits. This is why oil rigs can't often have anything docked to them. They use cranes to move people and equipment from boats. Naval ships setup cable shuttles to move people and goods between ships. It's possible that some locations on the sea --in some strange future weather conditions-- may remain so calm as to allow ships to safely dock to each other for long periods. But the first storm to come along would quickly destroy them. Snow Crash seems to have been borrowing on the folklore of the Sargasso Sea whose large patches of seaweed were once said to trap ships and bind them into strange communities of the lost. This was often depicted in old adventure literature, comics, and fantasy art. But it was just myth. Sargasso weed is very light and while it gathers together in gyres like plastic trash, it is also constantly being broken up and reformed.

There was once a proposal for a Sargasso-like marine settlement based on the principles of a colonial organism, composed of dwelling pods, energy 'animals' with deployable wind and solar, fish pens, and other special floating modules linked together by a web of cables and always digitally aware of their relative positions. Using parasails for propulsion, it would gather its parts together closer when the sea conditions were calm allowing gangways to be used --trying to travel mostly in the 'doldrums' along the Equator-- but would spread out over a larger area to avoid collisions when the weather was rough. The catch with this idea was that dwellings were like the escape pods used by oil rigs and people would have to put up with a very rough ride every time the weather turned poor. However, such a concept might be combined with 'sea tower' designs using SPAR buoy structures that were more comfortable, but very difficult to fabricate or repair at sea.

There are two aspects to this proposition; communities built at shore in sheltered water and communities built on the open sea. The two examples are of the former type, both relying on natural bays and connection to nearby urban facilities. So these are not really very different from the houseboat communities that have existed in many places for centuries or their more modern alternatives developed in the US/Canadian northwest and the Netherlands.

Houseboat communities were originally created to exploit what was once undervalued (because of their industrial aspect) waterfront areas, avoid costly coastal property prices, and their property taxes creating attractors for the poor and alienated dockworking class resulting in what would be their main appeal; eclectic makeshift architecture with a nautical character and a bohemian multi-ethnic atmosphere. This, of course, is what resulted in most modern municipalities systematically destroying them, with those that remain evolved into eclectic neighborhoods with some tourism gravitas or enough wealthy folk able to bully local bureaucracies into submission. San Francisco's houseboat community is a prime example. In the Netherlands, however, they became simply another way to facilitate development in a place flood prone and short on land and were sponsored by government, but in that case they have been far less eclectic in design and largely indestinguishable from the upper-middle-class townhouse developments of the region. The developers behind the Maldives project noted is a famous developer of these very projects. Similar development has gone on in the Seattle/Vancouver area for some time, but this being the sort of country it is, the aspect is more of a variation on the gated community. The ferrocement construction technology used is quite common to what is now known as the 'floating home industry' and has been in use for many decades. Basically, slab foundations on water. There is really nothing very special about living in these places, since they've all mostly lost that bohemian eclecticism that once made them appealing and are indestinguishable from other housing development --though these projects are more mixed-use. It's just another way to squeeze more high-end waterfront housing into overloaded urban areas, now with an eco-tech greenwashing angle rather than the bohemian subculture appeal of the past. However, the Maldives project is likely to be exclusively tourism-centric and rather theme-park-like.

Open sea communities remain something of a pipe dream because of the overhead of very large breakwater structures or active wave attenuation structures needed to exist in open sea conditions and the need for independent transportation with very modest operational economies of scale yet intercontinental range. (which, basically, doesn't exist off-the-shelf) In spite of this, they remain something of an obsession for those enamored of the fantasy of Galt's Gulch style autonomous zones or, even less likely, total personal autarky. They are, technically, feasible to create but unlikely except through some very large industrial venture --and there are only a few possibilities there-- or the efforts of billionaires motivated, perhaps, by the desire to escape the consequences of a collapse of civilization on land they so greatly contributed to. Most proposals for these marine colonies have, to date, been grossly ill-conceived, their creators more enamored of their AnCap ideological fantasies than the practical logistics of creating sustainable ventures and places to live. If not Muskian techno-grifts from the start, they usually end in similar fashion...

Open sea marine settlements could become a vector of development for some powerful renewables technology; OTEC, polyspecies mariculture, H-ship and hybrid sail technology, etc. But their huge flaw is that we simply don't have a low-carbon way to build them as they would rely on concrete we, as yet, have no practical carbon-neutral/negative alternatives for. And we're talking massive, Hoover Dam, volumes of concrete here these things could never persist long enough (given the 50 year at best lifespan of concrete in even benign conditions) to compensate for.

Coastal settlements have a similar problem with concrete (the Oceanix company talks, in their marketing pitches, of some variant of the long-debunked Hilbertz electrolytic accretion process, which is doubtful), but need only use ferrocement for their base platforms. Actual buildings would be made from lighter materials, which have many sustainable options --assuming anyone cares to use them.

One promising green role for such communities has been in eco-tourism where locating habitation on the water can preserve the natural habitats nearby people are seeking to visit. And a number of people in the Northwest have adopted floating homes on this very basis, wishing to preserve the pristine beauty of the forest properties they are living next to. And this comes with the advantage of an essentially pre-made mobile home quickly deployed, much like the Tiny Homes but less restricted in size and easy to expand. That's something I could certainly get behind, though it would need to be supported with some equally green transportation, the boats and small planes common to the area pretty bad in fossil fuel use. Being 'off grid' isn't really as green as it's made out to be. In this context such communities have potential for creating eco-villages, eco-cities, and proto-arcologies in the remote locations these are usually relegated to, but with less local impact, exploring the possibilities of various communal/mutualist/cooperative living arrangements, urban farming and independent industry technology, and the like. But, as yet, no one has actually proposed such things. (well, with the exception of yours truly...)

Was listening to this song just as this pic scrolled into view.

The Mounted Animal Nature Trail - Arrogant Worms

IMO perhaps toward the end of the century at best. My reasoning here is that space activity is likely heading into a contraction mid-century as the economic drag of climate change impacts compels a revision of the prestige-driven approach of contemporary space agencies. Some will be consolidated into national science programs. Some will not survive at all. Consider, a great many space center facilities are in endangered coastal locations. KSC will, most certainly, be inundated by the end of the century. Yet NASA has no established plans for the relocation of its facilities --the politicization of climate long making the subject impossible to discuss. How well will space program budgets fair when the insurance industry starts abandoning whole regions of the country, Dust Bowl style mass migrations begin, and Washington DC starts looking like Venice on a seasonal basis with outrageous civil engineering follies being proposed to preserve it and the other centers of power, commerce, culture, and upper-class property?

I feel that for space development to progress at all during this century there is going to have to be a radical re-think of how space activity is supposed to work. The racket of throwing bodies into the void for its own sake is not going to persist. The money won't be there. Space development will become increasingly reliant on tele/robotics, in-space production, and high-flexibility-launch (possibly at sea) as a means to driving down costs and operational scales by commoditizing and driving down payload values or replacing terrestrial payloads altogether. (payload values drive launch costs by driving reliability overhead. There's a Tyranny of the Reliability Equation just as there is a Tyranny of the Rocket Equation. CATS was never about rocket technology, but logistics) To survive, space will have to become something you can do at a university level, and I think it will.

The creative potential, sadly much neglected today. The potential to freely explore interesting new ways to make and build in a very different environment.

The space agencies and the Willy Wonka oligarchs look to space mostly for prestige and glory. The racket of state and corporate spectacle with some Big Science thrown in so it doesn't seem like a complete waste of time that, in the end, never actually delivers on its perpetual promise of opening space to society.

Space enthusiasts tend to be motivated by a somewhat erroneous sense of adventure and thrills, as so long promised by science fiction. Remote sensing has given us a good picture of what's on offer in our immediate cosmic neighborhood and it's all pretty-much Iceland or Greenland with less air --beautiful in its primeval ruggedness, but there ain't much going on over a Saturday night. There is much to learn and discover, but we're probably not stumbling onto the world of Avatar in an overlooked crater somewhere. Alas, we will have to wait for the means to reach other stars for any prospect of that --SciFi moved on long ago. In truth, it's mostly the sorts of things that excite the likes of geologists. Important, sure, but they generally don't need humans around to do. Nothing in space really does, in an era of robotics and AI. Suited astronauts can't actually do a hell of a lot. So all they really add is cost and risk, usually for the sake of that spectacle. It doesn't matter how cheap the seats on the rocket if all you can do on arrival is stare out a porthole. Without a practical means to make and build in the space environment, it might as well be the submarine ride at Disneyland.

And then there are those motivated by weltschmerz. World-weariness. The compulsion to get away from the noise, hassle, and oppression of a far-too-big society on an ever-shrinking world to a place where everything isn't owned by someone else with a compulsion to lord it over the rest of us. As Robert Zubrin once famously and half-jokingly said; we go to Mars because that's now how far you have to go to get away from the cops. Bruce Sterling suggested this would be the primary motivation of space colonization, and I tend to agree. Richard Proenneke was more space colonist material than Elon Musk will ever be.

But I see space as the ultimate form of Minecraft. A vast neglected backyard waiting to be made into something interesting, like a garden. We tend to think of space in a context of what we can take away from it. I'm more interested in what we might make out of it. To be a playfully artistic demiurge wandering the cosmos, bringing it to life.