The question may sound provocative, even absurd: Could the sea become our sixth inhabited realm, after the traditional continents? But this is not fiction — it is foresight.

As climate change reshapes our world, the ocean is no longer just a vast expanse beyond the shore. It is a rising force — sometimes destructive, often unpredictable, and increasingly unavoidable. In the face of rising sea levels, submerged coastlines, and millions of displaced people, it is time to ask not whether we can resist the ocean, but whether we can learn to live with it.

Consider Tuvalu, a Pacific nation where one in three residents applied for a climate visa to Australia in just ten days. Their homeland is vanishing beneath the waves. According to the latest IPCC report, nearly one billion people may be living in flood-prone coastal zones by 2050. The sea will rise — by 65 centimeters or more by the end of the century, warns NASA. This is no longer a distant scenario. It is unfolding now.

The sea as possibility

Faced with this, we must go beyond emergency thinking. We must begin imagining.

Rather than clinging to a doomed standoff with nature — raising walls, relocating communities, lamenting lost lands— what if we embraced the sea as possibility? Could we transform constraint into opportunity? Could we float, rather than flee?

This is not naïve optimism. It is already in motion. Projects such as the Floating City in the Maldives, Oceanix Busan in South Korea, and the Smart Offshore Ecosystem in French Polynesia are paving the way for a new way of working and living — on the water, not despite it.

These multi-purpose floating infrastructures propose more than survival. They imagine new ways of living — adaptive, sustainable, regenerative. They could house researchers, climate refugees, food systems, clean energy technologies, and perhaps even futures we have yet to fully envision. Technology is no longer the limiting factor. Political will, legal frameworks, and cultural readiness are.

Jules Vernes’ dream

This transformation raises profound questions. Who governs floating infrastructures? Do they fall under national or international law? Can they be sovereign? Legal scholar Olivier Lasmoles invites us to consider the legal voids and grey zones these new geographies may occupy. Economist Laurent Ferrara reminds us that we are entering a world of heightened uncertainty — and our models for stability must evolve. Professor Dennys Eduardo Rossetto, with his work on frugal innovation, offers a vital reminder: innovation thrives under constraint, and creativity may be our best tool for resilience.

Let us be clear: choosing to live on the ocean is not an escape from the consequences of climate change. It is a confrontation with them — bold, creative, and necessary. It is a call to redesign not just our cities, but our relationship with nature itself.

For too long, the ocean has been treated as a boundary — something to defend against or exploit. What if, instead, it became a home? A laboratory for cohabitation? A space to reimagine the human future?

The sea is rising — and so must our imagination, our ambition, and our readiness.

The time has come to stop asking whether floating habitats are realistic, and to start asking how to make them equitable, sustainable, and wise. In doing so, we may finally become what Jules Verne, Jacques-Yves Cousteau, and Jacques Rougerie all dared to imagine: a civilization in true symbiosis with the sea.

Because what is at stake is more than territory. It is imagination.

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