What conditions would be needed to make it more viable to have offshore workers supported by towns at sea instead of going to shore?

Question

In this world the sea is far more utilized than today. Offshore oil drilling, wind & solar farms, rocket launches, hydrogen production, aquaculture, and mining are all big industries.

In real life almost all offshore activity is built around the assumption that workers will return to shore to live the rest of their lives. The time they spend at sea is only temporary. But what could make it so that instead of returning to shore people would instead live their lives in offshore towns?

As established already, there is a lot more offshore activity. Far more people are working at sea than in real life already. The latest they could be established is the rough technological equivalent of the irl 1970s, although the earlier they could be established the better. Although most of the above industries aside from offshore hydrogen production and rocket launches were started in the 1910s to early 1920s and well established by the late 1950s, so how to build large offshore structures is already known.

Climate change and sea level rise isn't a major concern for these people yet although knowledge of it as a problem is far more spread. It is known as a serious potential problem by most but it's also seen as a far off one due to the time frame. However people are still seriously looking into ways to mitigate it already still.

note: if there's any industry that could seriously make this more viable please do mention it

Answer 1

Increase distance to the shore

The farther away the shore is, the more everyday applications will move to where the workers are.

With the offshore facility just a few hours from the shore, you will have workers stay offshore during the week and spend their weekend on land. Everything they need in the freetime within the week will move towards the facility: grocery shops, bars etc.

With the offshore facility a few days away from the shore, you will have workers who spend their vacation on land. Everything they need over the months offshore will move towards the facility: hairdressers etc.

With the offshore facility a few weeks from the shore, you will have workers that accumulate free time over some years and then spend the accumulated free time on land. Everything they need over the years will move towards the facility. At this point they will probably already have housing, schools etc. to comfort even having your family offshore.

With the offshore facility a few months from the shore you will start to have people living their entire lives offshore without ever seeing land. Some might have the retirement plan to spend the rest of their lives on land, but for most it will be just their homeland. Only adventurous people would leave behind their home and travel to the far shores.

How to do this? It is your world! But here a few ideas:

• Limit traveling technology
• Make the ressources being drilled for only appear very far from the shore
• Increase the size of the planet
• Make the seas you have to travel to get to/from shore extremly dangerous

Answer 2

Lots of problems

On the surface (no pun intended) it seems that a floating town / city / nation should be quite feasible. Transport of freight by sea is vastly cheaper than any other means of transport, so resupply should be easier than for a coastal city and much easier than for an inland one. If a storm is coming then a mobile floating settlement can steer around it. However, there are numerous problems...

The first of these is simply that the "land" to build on is expensive and quite limited in size. There have been various questions on this site previously about how large the largest floating structure could be, which boil down to "we're not entirely sure, but there are major problems if you get much over the size of a few container ships linked together". The practical upshot is that without radically more advanced technology (eg temperature-stabilised large icebergs) a floating city is likely to be no more than an order of magnitude larger than the cruise ships / container ships / aircraft carriers that are on the waters today. Furthermore, there are many more restrictions on how high you can build without unacceptably reduced stability and habitability, so the same hull "area" on the water is not only more expensive but more limited in utility than an equivalent area of land and requires much more maintenance to remain afloat. Possibly a "city" could consist of a fleet of such structures cruising around together, so long as they give each other plenty of room, though it does not reduce the cost per usable space.

Second, there would need to be a much more favourable international political and military framework towards such structures than exists IRL. "Seasteading" has been unsuccessful so far due to various issues, including running afoul of international maritime regulations and/or perceived threats to sovereign integrity. If the structures are considered to be part of a sponsoring nation then suddenly it means that boundaries - such as restricted fishing waters - are shifting all the time based on the movements of each floating structure. Sooner or later it will end up in a shooting war, and the floating structures are highly vulnerable to all the weapons that navies have developed.

Third, there needs to be a reason to stay at sea rather than keeping only "working" platforms at sea and using land facilities for everything else. Frankly, I cannot think of a rationale for this on Earth - even with much slower voyages in the Age of Sail there were no attempts at creating floating R&R facilities in deep water, sailors just waited until they could get shore leave.

Answer 3

People have already done this with lakes from Switzerland to Mexico. If the infrastructure was made to do it viably mid ocean at town size then it could easily work.

I think the main thing would be economic viability. If there is a resource out there that makes it worth building to this scale then enticing people is easy. Provide education, shops and jobs and there's plenty of people who will apply. The first World is full of people from developing nations working in factories who never go home to live.

They educate their kids in the First World and send money home, but their kids don't leave. They're not interested in going and living where they have to grub around in the mud. They become engineers, lawyers, doctors, prisoners etc,.

You'd have to start with a more transient population of First World people filling teaching and administration roles, but after a generation you could fill those locally.

Answer 4

You need to create self-sufficient and socially viable communities.

People who work at sea and then return to shore usually have their families there.

In our world, sea-based occupations are massively dominated by men. This is mostly due to tradition, which in turn stems from the physical demands of most of these jobs.

If you want social progression to mirror our real world in terms of gender roles and female emancipation, you would need to introduce jobs traditionally reserved for women to your sea-based facilities (i.e. Administration). This inevitably would result in romantic relationships forming. However employers may need to set schedules that promote socializing(free time tends to be sparse on your typical oil-rig).

Faced with this, many employees would opt to stay at sea during the off-season, especially if they and their loved ones don't live on the same shores. This would create a demand for better living conditions and other facilities (social, entertainment, educational), attracting more people and transforming an industrial facility into a society that many consider their home, instead of dry land. Mind that costs of creating those facilities has to be low enough for companies to actually benefit from their workers staying.

At some point, the community will swell to such a size that importing food and other necessities becomes impractical, and they will start looking for ways to produce as much as they can and seek trade with other sea-based communities (which are closer to them than the nearest shore).