Today, companies like Kona Blue raise and harvest fish undersea in vast geometric netted enclosures, applying the same principles used to farm on land to aquaculture. The alternative, and the way most fishing was done for centuries, is trawling. This process drags a hooked net across the ocean floor, devastating the ocean bottom ecosystem, coral reefs in particular. Although open ocean aquaculture is potentially more productive and vastly less environmentally destructive, it is limited by on-site manpower. As all employees live onshore, they visit for maintenance, repair and harvest only twice monthly. To make this method more productive and economical than trawling, we must begin to put workers and their families on-site, where the farming is done, just as mines and mills grew communities around them in the early west. Permanent human colonies in the ocean may sound far fetched, but back in 1970 there were 69 undersea laboratories worldwide, most famously Jacques Cousteau's Conshelf II. It consisted of a multi-habitat village on the ocean floor, with docking facilities for submarines and all the amenities of a home on land. The necessary technology is old, mature, robust, and affordable. The habitats can be paid for in part by enthusiasts eager to live in such a colony and in part by investors hoping to profit from unrelated services that colonies might provide, like novelty hotels, resort facilities and rentable laboratory space. The colonists could be employed by Kona Blue, or as maintenance workers on the Gulf Stream Turbine. Expanded living/laboratory space would greatly benefit the NOAA, currently operating out of the cramped Aquarius Reef Base undersea laboratory. The benefits are many, but there is a chicken and egg problem. No single benefit, by itself, justifies the expense of the colony structure. No open ocean fish farm company would invest in the establishment of an entire seafloor community just to increase the productivity of its workers. To leverage all of these benefits together we need the colony, which might simply be comprised of a few dozen ambient pressure habitats and one hybrid decompression chamber for surfacing, to be established beforehand. Everything else will follow. As the century wears on, more and more of our resources will come from the sea. Already one in four relies on seafood for most of the protein in their diet, and many compaies such as Nautilus Minerals, Neptune Minerals and Seacor are mining the ocean for rare earth and precious metals. If we are to become responsible stewards of the ocean and not just exploiters of it, we must move into the blue frontier and inhabit it so that we'll gain a greater stake in its preservation. For more information, visit www.underseacolony.com