A Remote Possibility : Freedominium doesn’t exist. But the would-be creator of this far-fetched, far-away land hopes to use science to make his nation more than a notion.

Huddled around a pizza in an Irvine living room, half a dozen scientists and engineers plot to defect from America and start their own country: a prefab isle to be plunked down in the middle of the Pacific.

What they have in mind is a sort of space-age Gilligan’s Island--an uncharted tropical paradise complete with voice-activated doors, Hovercraft automobiles and, of course, McDonald’s.

Freedominium of Merica, as the island would be called, is merely the latest in a long line of sometimes serious, sometimes strange schemes to found new nations.

Others include the Conch Republic in Florida (motto: “We seceded where others failed”), the Rhode Island motor scooter rebellion of 1984 and Sealand, an anti-aircraft tower “nation” off the coast of England.

But Freedominium, with its scientific underpinnings, ranks among “the most ambitious (projects) I’ve heard of in the last few years,” says Erwin S. Strauss, author of “How to Start Your Own Country.”

Not that it has a chance in hell of succeeding, he adds.

If previous attempts are any guide, shaky finances, a hostile neighbor or an overweight Tongan king will ruin everything.

Even if the island makes it, don’t expect a Freedominium history book full of Magna Chartas and midnight rides.

Instead, the story will involve an electrified bowl of sea water and a founding father in a gleaming white Cadillac.

Plus the Pneumonia Incident of 1988.

In that year, future Freedominium founder Brock d’Avignon was roaming the U.S. in a boat-sized automobile, taking a break from--according to his resume--such accomplishments as being “cold-weather monorail collision prevention consultant” at Disney World, and inventor for NASA of “the piggyback flight test of flaps-up release of the Space Shuttle from posts aboard a Boeing 747 with a P-38 tail versus dive of a C-130 air braking to initiate rail-track shuttle slide-off.”

He so impressed Disney officials with his talents, d’Avignon says, they offered him--at the tender age of 20--the post of Epcot supervisor.

Alas, he had to turn it down because he was doing missionary work for the Mormon church.

If true (Disney was unable to confirm the account, which dates to 1974), it was a bad career move: d’Avignon now lives in a motor home with his father and helps run a pizza restaurant in Temecula.

In any case, by 1988, a near-fatal bout with pneumonia had sidelined his Cadillac wanderings and led him to re-evaluate his life and goals.

That’s when his mind drifted back to a science experiment he saw at a 1980 Libertarian conference.

*

Just sit right back

and you’ll hear a tale,

a tale of a paper clip . . .

*

The experiment--conducted by a couple of teen-agers--involved a bowl of sea water and paper clips hooked up to a battery, and showed how an artificial island could be formed anywhere in the ocean. The electricity caused minerals from the water to collect on the clips, forming a coral-like surface. If duplicated on a larger scale, the teens said (quoting research by a Texas architecture professor), the technique would produce a super-strength island that could be anchored to the ocean floor.

“I realized,” d’Avignon says, “that these kids had made the idea of an ocean colony technologically possible.” He and a college roommate later fiddled with the concept at Brigham Young University, where d’Avignon earned a degree in communications and public relations, but it wasn’t until the great Pneumonia Incident that he got serious.

Now 38, he leads a slowly growing coterie of (mostly male, mostly Libertarian) scientists, lawyers, computer junkies and engineers known as the New Island Creation Consortium, or NICCO. Their plan is to make millions building artificial marinas, floating casinos and offshore residential developments, then use the profits to build their own island nation near the Equator.

They picture Freedominium as a real-life version of the fictional utopia that author Ayn Rand created in “Atlas Shrugged”: a land free from the evils of taxes, government and bad TV sitcoms.

That’s just for starters. NICCO member Howard Hinman, a paralegal from Fountain Valley, envisions a space port where island residents could mine precious metals from asteroids lassoed in space and splashed down in the Pacific. Other Freedominiacs mention windmill-driven electrical power, hydroponic farms and icebergs towed in for people who want to ski.

D’Avignon’s dream is a floating metropolis of 50,000 residents, but civil engineer Claudio Scalisi, one of the group’s pragmatists, says a more plausible scenario is a 70-acre archipelago with housing for 300 people, a hotel for tourists and a few palm trees.

“It’s also reasonable to assume you’re going to see at least one or two fine seafood restaurants,” chimes in Hinman.

“And maybe we’ll get (Robert) Schuller to build a Crystal Cathedral,” muses civil engineer and architect Joe Kuhn of Newport Beach.

In theory, Freedominium is possible. Artificial islands already exist in dozens of locales around the world. (And asteroids do contain billions of dollars in rare ores, scientists have said--although nobody has figured out how to bring them to earth.)

Singapore uses floating real estate for refineries and industrial plants, and Japan has plans for an offshore airport built on prefabricated islands, says Ernst Frankel, an MIT professor of ocean systems and management who has proposed construction of a $1.5-billion “Gaza Peace Island” as a Palestinian homeland off the coast of Egypt.

NICCO members seemingly have the scientific brainpower and desire to pull it off. But would-be potentates and secessionists almost never succeed.

Consider, for example, the Conch Republic of Key West, Fla. In 1982, law enforcement agents set up a roadblock to catch smugglers that also choked the island’s tourist trade. Residents declared themselves an independent nation and seceded from the Union.

According to a UPI account, “About 100 Key Westers, blowing conch shells, stormed a beach in a flotilla of speedboats, while another band of ‘revolutionaries’ tied a park ranger to a flagpole.” Needless to say, the tongue-in-cheek rebellion fizzled, save for an annual independence day celebration.

Another breakaway bid that went bust involved Block Island, R.I. Annoyed by hordes of summer tourists driving motor scooters, and unable to win legislative approval to regulate the vehicles, residents in 1984 vainly tried to form an independent state with Martha’s Vineyard, another rebel island, from neighboring Massachusetts.

About the only such attempt to succeed, says author Strauss, is Britain’s Sealand. In 1966, Roy Bates, a former “pirate radio” broadcaster, took over an abandoned World War II anti-aircraft tower near Essex and declared himself Prince Roy of Sealand.

He issued passports, coins and stamps--and at one point fired warning shots at repairmen fixing a nearby buoy. English officials promptly filed criminal charges, but a judge said the tower--seven miles from shore--fell outside his jurisdiction. Prince Roy reigns to this day, Strauss reports.

Other founding fathers have encountered less tolerant neighbors. In 1972, for instance, Nevada businessman Michael J. Oliver spent $200,000 transforming a pair of underwater reefs into a 15-acre island called the Republic of Minerva, only to have it invaded by a boatload of convicts and musicians from nearby Tonga. The conquering army, sent by Tonga’s 350-pound monarch, King Taufa’ahau Tupou IV, planted a flag, played the national anthem and left.

The sea later swallowed Minerva.

Fledgling sovereigns who wish to avoid such a fate might check out another Erwin Strauss volume--”Basement Nukes.”

NICCO members, however, figure the best way to dodge hostilities is choosing a more remote location. Still, that doesn’t eliminate the possibility of civil war, which seems increasingly likely while listening to these guys talk for a few hours.

Halfway into the group’s monthly meeting in Irvine, for example, engineer Kuhn and chemist Mike Moone are at each other’s throats about everything from electrical power to skyscrapers.

“You’re not going to put a 20-story building on one of these (islands),” Moone growls. “A 15-mile-an-hour wind would tip the whole thing over.”

As the arguing continues, another NICCO member jokes that Freedominium might be better off as a cluster of separate islands: “We’ll each have a section and throw rocks at each other.”

There are other obstacles, too.

Such as money.

Building this high-tech Gilligan’s Island is going to cost hundreds of millions, if not billions, but Freedominium has no Thurston Howells. D’Avignon likes to point out that “the ministry of Mother Teresa started with a penny,” but NICCO doesn’t even have that much and taxes are completely out of the question.

Another threat to the fledgling nation’s ultimate survival is the lack of founding mothers. Only a couple of NICCO’s 20-odd members are women (apparently Libertarian males outnumber Libertarian females 7 to 1 in the United States), a ratio that distresses Freedominium’s numerous bachelors: “Women are welcome in the group,” Hinman sighs. “ Lots of women are welcome in the group.”

Finally, there is the not-insignificant matter of international law.

“You can’t just build an island (in the middle of the ocean),” says MIT’s Frankel. “You need permission from the United Nations--and that would be difficult, if not impossible.”

The only way around it, he says, is to have an unanchored, relocatable island: “They count like ships.”

Then again, it might just be easier to buy an island that already exists.

Unless it’s near Tonga.