Seldon's Quest had mythical resonances for author Marshall Savage. Since writing The Millennial Project: Colonizing the Galaxy in Eight Easy Steps in 1992, Savage, a graduate of the University of Southern California, has been at the forefront of a growing movement attempting to overcome the conceptual gridlock crippling the United States space program since the Apollo moon landings ended.

For Savage, the writer turned space advocate, the Dark Ages facing humanity is a world afflicted by 'limits to growth' problems like exponential population increases, world food shortages and the need for non-polluting energy sources.

His vision of 'Homo Prometheus' highlights humanity's unique capacity to 'generate futures' by free choice and force of will; recalling Friedrich Nietzsche's description of the mind's "ability to build new horizons for itself beyond mere recombinations of the known."

In a remark that takes zoologist Richard Dawkin's controversial 'selfish gene' to its extremes, Savage declares, "We live in the most mythical of Ages and often fail to appreciate that we are the 'Genesis Effect' incarnate. It is our Destiny to colonize space."

This imagery recalls the cosmology invoked by the Peenemunde V-2 test site expatriate Wernher von Braun and the early Russian rocket scientist Tsiolovsky.

In short, Marshall Savage is a worthy candidate for a modern Hari Seldon.

The first step in his quest for space colonization was launched in 1987 when Savage created the non-profit Living Universe Foundation (formerly called the First Millennial Foundation) based in Rifle, Colorado. A dedicated team established a fledgling World Wide Web colony to propagate its memes. Many had been dormant since the mid 1970s when Gerard K. O'Neill co-founded the legendary L5 Society and wrote the book The High Frontier (1977) which rapidly established space migration as a new public fad. O'Neill testified to US Congress in January 1976, later pitching his space station designs to an indifferent corporate America. By late 1977 the public was reading Whole Earth Review publisher Stewart Brand's book Space Colonies, listening to Timothy Leary's 'Space Migration' lectures, and watching George Lucas' film Star Wars. Fantasy had replaced pragmatic idealism in the rush to storm the Heavens.

While Savage's model represents the Age of Aquarius' optimism at its peak, it is also "the first 'post-environmentalist consciousness' stab at this problem," according to Creon Levit, a scientist with the Numerical Aerodynamics Simulation Division at NASA's Ames Research Center.

"It's not just space colonization for its own sake, but it's an integrated plan of space colonization and 'save the planet' type activities," he says. "Most importantly there is a path – a 'bootstrap process' – to get there that seems like it might actually happen.

"The problems with the proposals that came out in the late 1970s and early 1980s were that they all required massive amounts of spending by the industrialized countries in order to get space colonization off the ground. O'Neill and Leary wanted massive chemical rocket launchers to build it, and solar powered satellites were really the only thing that they could come up with to get the thing boot-strapped. That required such a huge investment. They were talking hundreds of billions to get started, whereas the Millennial Project is talking about less than $100 million.

"Savage's plan has dropped the start-up cost by three or more orders of magnitude. In contrast to O'Neill or Leary, the first couple of phases occur on Earth. The second stage – a prototype self-sufficient sea colony named Aquarius Rising, is probably the most exciting stage of the whole scenario. If we can get that to work, I'm happy, and space colonization is just one of the things that we can accomplish in the future as a result."

Savage initially conceived a theme park concept for Aquarius Rising based at St Croix in the US Virgin Islands. "There were many tourist elements to that development, in order to generate enough economic voltage to carry the rest of the project," Savage explains, "but our chance to purchase an option on a 580 acre piece of land fell through when someone else bought it for cash. Now we're doing site evaluations looking at a more focused project that doesn't need so many of the tourist amenities to carry the economics, and the Grand Cayman Islands is the prime candidate for that project now."

"This project is basically just the prototype sea colony for about 100 people, floating in a sheltered lagoon, powered by a two and a half mega-watt Ocean Thermal Energy Converter (OTEC); in the US$50-70 million range, as opposed to the US$200-250 million range for the larger scale project at St Croix."

"We really need a viable place to start this 'real world' project; the trick is, it's got to stand on it's own legs economically. There is no subsidy available, so the economic engine has to turn from the beginning bell."

LUF Core member Jack Reynolds revealed that "the Cayman Islands imports 95 per cent of its food annually from the US, costing $300 million. International trade prospects in the region make this option viable."

"We have a tremendous amount of work that has to be done, in order to paint a pretty clear picture for financiers when you're talking about money at this kind of magnitude," reveals Savage. "Many details – both mechanic and economic – have to be worked out to show exactly how that project would unfold. It would certainly have to be a phased project where you do certain things first, and then as it gathers economic momentum you do others."

"There are other options," Levit suggests. "If the organization were to get big enough, and have some medium level of numbers in the tens of thousands, there might be a possibility of at least partially self-funding it. There are numerous possibilities, but the initial plan of building a techno/eco/tourist resort/research station prototype is brilliant!"

Reynolds remarks that the Cayman Islands site was selected partly because "its 'deep cold water currents' allow us to use OTEC technology efficiently, the core around which the colony will be built. It is possible to use currently available 'off the shelf' components in building an initial OTEC seed ship, using a closed cycle model."

Synergistic spinoffs from OTECs hold the key to the colony's economic prosperity and controllable environmental impact. "These potentially include fresh water production, cold storage and air conditioning, cold-bed horticulture, hydroponics and large scale mariculture," Reynolds suggests.