High Concept
Introducing Project Utopia

The best thing about most of the stuff we bring you: you can get it. Right now. But occasionally something comes across our desks that’s such a game-changer, we just have to tell you, despite its... availability issues. Hence “High Concept,” where we dig deeper into a concept product that we’re really rooting for.

You’ve got no complaints with modern science.

Cars, antibiotics, 3D television: all great stuff. But somehow, we’ve fallen behind on villainous lair technology.

But next year, we just might catch up.

The wonder before you is called (of course) Project Utopia, an 11-level floating island base, coming to the world in 2012... hopefully.

Whatever you do, don’t call it a yacht. It’s more like a splashed-down flying saucer—330 feet across, and complete with four helicopter pads, four fully azimuthing thrusters and an observation deck that sits over 200 feet above the water.

They don’t tell you how to fill all that space—presumably to avoid tipping off MI6—but it’s enough room to hold a hundred people or (we’re just spitballing) a diamond-powered, satellite-destroying death ray.

So when your weekend boating expedition turns into a scheme for a water-bound civilization, you can commission your own Utopia from the UK architects behind the fiendish device. Fair warning: it may take a few decades to actually build the thing.

Which will give you time to get started on that death ray.