I am actually writing these words from Aquatica on the floor of the sea. 

 
The dream is real. Our team has logged countless hundreds of crew-days in this undersea realm so vast that it makes all the combined land areas on earth look like insignificant slivers of real estate by comparison.

 
 As I write these words for you, I am sitting in a beautiful lagoon, down at 30 feet in depth. My wife and I slept here last night and before that, had dinner here, watched a movie and lived our lives as countless millions of other couples did. 

 
While they had the company of eight billion other humans, we were all alone here. When the sun sat above us, on earth, we were the only occupants of a human habitat (not a submarine)  in the entire vastness of Aquatica, the great global ocean.  We know that because there are only three operational undersea habitats on earth and the other two are vacant on this day.

 
To me the very thought is staggering.  On this planet, whose vast majority is covered by its great global ocean, only a pair of humans out of the teeming billions of people who are living under the sea right at this moment.  Only two humans living their lives in a fixed habitat and our whole purpose is to live here to enjoy the life of an undersea family. It is an astonishing thought to be sure, any yet, it is true. 

 
Aquatica is a vast region of the earth’s livable domain and it is filled with more resources than all the land areas combined by many magnitudes.  It is a territory of astounding potential and yet, totally unoccupied.  As I mentioned in my previous work, the total permanent human occupation of Aquatica is exactly: zero.  When Claudia and I leave here this afternoon, the string of a few visitors will continue, but no one on our planet calls this place home.

 
Claudia and I are aquanauts many times over.  We come here as often as we can to enjoy this place we hope one day to call our permanent home.  She is eating breakfast right beside me at this moment as I write these words, and occasionally I will steal a moment away from this keyboard to gaze outside through the large viewport into the tropical waters just before me.  And it is transfixing.  It is indeed mesmerizing.  It is a world of astonishing and alien beauty that few eyes have seen from this perspective – looking out over their breakfast table into the vast ocean before us. 

 
This book, Undersea Colonies of Aquatica, is meant to be a follow-on book to Undersea Colonies that I published a few years ago.  That book set the stage both historically for what has gone on before and where it has all led us, and allegorically as we briefly looked ahead into the undersea communities of tomorrow.

 
This work, the Undersea Colonies of Aquatica intends to pick up where Undersea Colonies left off and look ahead as far as we dare into the future of permanent human undersea colonies, settlements, communities, cities, nations and empires.  But instead of writing metaphorically, I intend to write as a kind of technological and social prophesy, trying as best I can to peer through the mists of future time into a new and astonishing world that lies just ahead of us all.

 
But for now, I am going to close up this computer and finish breakfast!  Before me is a feast of microwaved eggs, bacon, sliced peaches, milk and orange juice.  When we are done, we will clean up our table, wash dishes and prepare for a day of filming and diving outside.  For after all, just outside our front porch lies all of Aquatica in all of its beauty and splendor – 321 million cubic miles of humankind’s future.

Aquatica