Randa Abdel-Fattah

And he remembers watching The Searchers back in the 1990s, a time when he was finding himself spending more and more hours on the newly minted World Wide Web, where he stumbled across a fascinating trend, stories of people who in the 60s and 70s attempted to build micronations at sea, all of which pretty much failed.

Well, this is weird, but okay.

He found himself imagining what those attempts might have been like and considering how he would try to build a new nation in the middle of the sea.

Scenes from The Searchers flashed through his mind.

He thought maybe it would feel a lot like the Wild West, only wetter, with one big difference.

So I thought it was a positive endeavor, largely because, unlike the colonization of the West, where there were previous occupants, in the ocean, the only previous occupants are the fish population.

So on a whim, he sat down at his computer and started typing.

The blank page, a kind of canvas to design a new world.

In the paper, Wayne brainstormed all kinds of engineering hacks to different problems he foresaw coming up.

It's probably a bad idea.

Hoping to avoid the pitfalls that had sunk those previous micronation attempts.

Like how to survive the elements

You can extract energy from waves.

Huge waves.

Relentless sun.

Use the difference in temperature of the surface water.

And what about food?

No, you can eat fish.

It's out in the middle of the ocean.

Doesn't have a lot of fish.