"Ultimately you have these components and you blow that prototype floating community up to about one thousand people, scale up your OTECs and power production to about ten mega-watts, and be doing several hundred to several thousand acres of intensive mariculture at that point, but that takes some getting up to."

The LUF plans to have a basic prototype established by 2004 in the Maldives, to confront and deal with resulting socio-political challenges such as political sovereignty, trade, and defence by 2008, and to begin construction of a large-scale Aquarius Rising by 2010, due for completion in 2016.

"Unlike the modern megalopolis which is a primitive macro-organism, Aquarius Rising solves the predatory 'zero sum' resource cycle by evolving into a cybergenesis organism; moving urban planning from the level of a slime mould to a lotus flower," Savage declares.

Directly confronting doomsayers like The Club of Rome, Savage remarks, "They're clearly right that we've got to do something, but clearly wrong that it's a resource limited question. The sun is beaming down 18,000 times as much power as humanity is using just on the surface of the Earth today."

"We're facing a test of human ingenuity and willpower at this point. If we allocated one per cent of the resources we spend on stupid and frivolous things to the proposition of tapping the resources of space, Humanity is looking at a very unlimited future.

"As far as the doomsday scenarios of warfare and so forth, it helps if we take a broader view of history. I don't have a Pollyanna view, but I think a lot of human institutions are changing very rapidly. The sociopolitical battle between small elites and the burgeoning population that characterized the Cold War, for example, has basically been waged to its conclusion."

This 'evolutionary test' was mentioned by Arthur C. Clarke (who wrote a gushing Preface for Savage's book in 1994) in his story The Sentinel (1958), later filmed by Stanley Kubrick as 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), and also in the writings of engineer Buckminster Fuller, who designed geodesic domes and developed the efficient structural system known as Tensegrity Structures. "Fuller had that breadth of magnitude of thinking which could not be pigeon-holed, and obviously had a way of penetrating right to the heart of a question and coming up with a better solution than anyone had ever thought of," Savage believes. "I'm trying to benefit by his example in many ways. Right now which is a critical moment in the growth of the LUF, I'm trying to give up control and hand over responsibility of a lot of things to other people. Some people find that very strange, but it's very essential in anything like this. If Fuller had done that with his Dymaxion House, giving up the control necessary to take the next step of mass production when the design was less than perfect, we'd be living in a different world today."

Fuller developed the Dymaxion in 1927, a structural design aimed at economical, efficient, trouble free living developed from systems of aircraft and chassis production, intended for mass production. Savage believes that Fuller made a serious business error with the Dymaxion House that the LUF has learnt from.

"They apparently had orders on the books for about 250,000 houses before they were even in production. He had the backing and the financial resources lined up to go into production and fill those orders. With that much pump prime - then they could have sold millions of units and the mass production economics that he was talking about for the Dymaxion model would have kicked in, and you and I could be actually living in Dymaxion houses that were actually cool in the summertime and only cost $50,000 for a couple of thousand square feet thanks to mass production. But at the critical moment when he needed to go into production and the thing was less than perfect, he couldn't give up the control necessary to take that next step. He had to hold on and make it perfect. And that can't happen in this world, so the whole thing fell apart and that whole revolution never happened."

Important early support came from futurist/author/social architect Barbara Marx Hubbard, and key Hard SF authors like Gentry Lee, Larry Niven, Poul Anderson. Jerry Pournelle featured The Millennial Project as 'Book of the Month' in an August 1993 Byte magazine article. Savage's book also garnered positive reviews from Astronomy and Whole Earth Review.

The 1990s saw a resurgence in commercially orientated organizations like the LUF that operate outside NASA's sphere of influence. Key organisations include the Space Access Society, the X Prize Foundation, and the Island One Society. Just as the LUF's project designations are a throwback to mid 1970s New Age optimism and the common practice of using names from ancient mythology for manned space flight programs; this trend remanifests the many private projects that were common in the late 1970s, prompted by feasibility studies of the RAND Corporation and the Smithsonian Institution . These options became more restricted as NASA's space shuttle program became dominated by Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA) and other military contracts. Cold War geopolitical manoeuvres by the United States and the USSR, plus fears of uncontrollable world population growth ended such 'selfish' uses of resources, leading to the current NASA bureaucratic gridlock.