over simply purchasing a large portion of mainland?

Maybe it wold be a little bit more isolated, but there would be all sorts of constaints, such as having to transport building materiels, lack of utilities providers, transporting the food and other resources needed to support the population from the mainland, etc. In addition, due to global warming, the place could be swamped in a few hundred years.

It seems to me that it would be a lot simpler and better to simply buy a large tract of land on a continent. That way, we already have utilities, Internet connectivity, etc.

You summed it up with isolation, while buying a tract of land on the mainland would be nice, it's only a stepping stone to true isolation. (If isolation wasn't an issue then we could all just live in other countries).

If it can be summed up in one word there is a problem. I would like more than one advantage to the island idea. If we really want isolation, we can build a fence(we americans like the concept of fences) around some isolated piece of land. There are lots of isolated places on earth without us having to build one ourselves. But being surrounded with the only way out being a boat brings up ideas of disasters and diseases spreading with no way out. Call me paranoid, but I don't really care for that image.

Disasters would definatlry be a problem, as would medical care(on many islands if someone has a serious medical condition they have to be transported to the mainland)

Islands, on the other hand, are generally safer from epidemics.

As far as isolation goes, if you bought the land in somewhere like the US or somewhere with similar laws, you could simply put up a fence and/or kick out  tresspassers(Americans are very big on the idea of private property)

This post was last modified: 06-06-2006 01:31 AM by nathanww.

If a tidal wave came towards America there would be few ways out and with diseases it would mean the people there would have stronger immune systems. A village in England called Eyam survived the Black Death by Isolating itself. The problem with fenses is people keep jumping over them and if you build them too high the fall on you. There are aways going to be advantages and disadvantages to this.

Being on an island does not significantly affect whether you can get medical care, it is possible to be further from a hospital on the mainland than you would be on an island. A basic medical centre on the island can provide first aid and stabilise the condition of anyone with medical problems.

Small hospitals make me nervous.

Alsao, even if there is adequate medical care, there is still the issue of utilities and such to consider. If we were on an island, we would have to either rely on mainland facilities for power, water, etc., which could be pretty unreliable, or generate our own electricity and purify our own water(which could also be unreliable).

nathan, all of these things have already been thought of, the man-made islands in Dubai receive such things from the mainland as they are very close to it, so don't worry about that. :smile:

There is another issue, what are we going to do with all our wastes human wastes that is. They ship that out too i guess.  Could they handle sewage from 300+ people? that's a lot of *** to ship.

It may be that the problems can be solved by relying on the mainland. But is that really desirable.  Would it be more satisfing to try and solve some of these problems ourselves. It also cut some of the costs. since these services probably come with a price tag.  We have been talking a lot about our intelegence and creativity. Maybe now it is the time to to put our money where our mouths are.

I have an idea about drinking water that  I have had running in my head for two days now. It would use solor energy to remove salt(and other impurities for that matter) from seawater. it easier to explain visually than verbally.


how it works is simple. a pump pumps seawater up to the foucal point of a solar furnace(works on the principle as burning ants with a magnifying glass except it uses mirrors instead). The water boils into steam leaving the salt  behind. The steam then powers a generator which runs or helps run the pump. the steam finally goes into the condenser(which will probably be under water) and turns back into to pure water.

this is thery of course. i am not sure if it could be made practical. I am still thinking it out.

As for waste products, there are environmentally friendly ways of breaking it down that could be designed with houses, so that you end up with a small amount of compost for the gardens.

They use no water, so are efficient too.
Many of the idea we used could be based on self sufficiency, but not to a degree that would make life a struggle, nor that would deter holiday makers.

http://www.ekolet.com/ekolet-eng/index.htm

Drifter, you could also probably use the salt with that idea for cooking.

There's an easier way to do it.  If you have trees on the island, bag bunches of their leaves (still attached to the trees) in clear plastic bags, tied tightly or taped to the branches.  The plant will exude water from the leaves during the day and in the evening you can just collect it.  I've done this with eucalypts and the water is completely drinkable, with no aftertaste of eucalyptus oil at all.  Wattle leaves also work, and the imported deciduous trees make so much water that the bags needed to be emptied three times faster than the Australian native trees.  You just need to scale it up and have dedicated "farmers" to harvest the water.
Alison

There are more efficient designs for solar desalination which can be made, the idea itself is sound, would need alot of storage of fresh water though given the unpredicateble nature of solar systems due to the amount of Sunlight varying with the weather.

Well, it would be a good idea to have a thermal plant available...In fact, as far as electricity goes, maybe we could run the island on steam-steam power...

In fact half the population of Eyam died of the plague. The isolation was more of an act of altruism (to stop the disease spreading to other villages) than survival.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eyam

Eyam
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Eyam (pronounced "Eem") is a small village in Derbyshire, England. The village is best known for being the "plague village" that chose to isolate itself when the Black Death was found in the village in August 1665, rather than see the infection travel further north.

Plague history
The plague had been brought to the village in a flea-infested bundle of cloth that arrived from London. After the initial deaths, the panicked townspeople turned to their rector, William Mompesson. He persuaded them to quarantine the entire village to prevent the disease from spreading further. The plague raged in the village for 16 months and killed at least 260 villagers.

When the first outsiders visited Eyam a year later, they found half the town had survived the plague. Survival appeared random, as many plague survivors had close contact with the bacterium but never caught the disease. For example, Elizabeth Hancock never became ill, despite burying six children and her husband in a week. The village gravedigger handled hundreds of plague-ravaged corpses, but ultimately survived.

Eyam's role in genetic research
Some research indicates that the villagers of Eyam may have had some genetic protection from the bubonic plague. A CCR5 gene mutation designated as "delta 32" was found in a statistically significant number, 14%, of direct descendents of the plague survivors. The Delta 32 mutation appears to be very rare. In fact, the levels of Delta 32 found in Eyam were only matched in regions of Europe that had been affected by the plague and in Americans of European origin. It has also been suggested that the Delta 32 mutation, if inherited from both parents, may provide immunity to HIV/AIDS.

More recent research at Scripps Research Institute discredits the Delta 32 hypothesis.