Bare with me as I bring you this crazy idea.
With all the bureaucracy in most countries, and being under the thumb of the banks and the government, I was thinking along these lines:
What if you bought land in a very remote area, perhaps a dessert, a place were nobody comes around usually. You could still get internet access, perhaps by sattelite if there was no cell phone coverage. I would think an entry level package would not set you back too much. Then you'd need a truck, gasoline and some money to get all your gear.
You could set up a small settlement and with the usage of modern technology you could use solar panels (perhaps even a windmill or two if windy) to create electricity. With that electricity you could extract water from the air, even Sahara dessert air contains 25% water. There's ready made solutions to buy that would accommodate this for you. With solar power you could also cool down your cabin to a tolerable temperature. Building smart placing the settlement somewhere were the likelihood of it all being washed away by a surprise storm with heavy rain was very low, and also having a couple of large water tanks for gathering rain water (could be collected off the roofs).
With the water, and some soil you bring with you, you could even make a greenhouse, and perhaps cool it instead of warming it, you could grow edible plants. You could also have some animals, like rabbits, chicken etc. With your internet connection, you could do some small amounts of work, perhaps translation, blogging, coding or something else that could be done online.
Ocassionally you could truck out for supplies to the nearest town of stuff you'd need. If you were really ingenious, you might even make yourself a solar powered drone that could fly to the nearest city to pick up stuff you wanted to buy. Using bitcoin, you'd cut yourself off completely from the current financial system.
- No bank accounts.
- No connection to the power grid.
- No connection to municipality water or seawage system.
- Internet connection, most likely through sattelite (could be paid directly in bitcoin if possible, or through a proxy)
- No property tax (I'm sure there's places in the world where you would not need to pay taxed for a few acres of dry land in a remote spot)
- A guard dog
- Some guns and ammo.
- You could build a self sustainable eco-system in a small dome. Not an easy project, but doable for the adventurous person. This could include a fish tank, for raising your own fish!
- Any escrements and urine from humans and animals could be reused as fertilizer for the plants.
Basically what you need for survival is a place to live with tolerable temperatures, water and food. If you were able to do all year crops, you would always have a constant supply of vegetables and fruits. With chickens, you would always have eggs, and with rabbits and other small animals, you could treat yourself with some fresh meat now and then.
Perhaps a group would be better than just one man or a couple. As there would be many things to do, but as the group grows, so would the amount of things to do and the mouths to feed grow. Also with a larger group, the chance of disagreements and fallouts are bigger.
Some advantages to such a scheme:
* Silence (not even a remote airplane to be heard most days)
* Nobody nagging you.
* Freedom, no property tax collection, no bills (except the internet bill).
Now, there might be occasions where you needed supplies and services from society. For example dental or medical care. Also you might need/want to buy supplies and certain foods that you cannot produce yourself. Perhaps for self reliance living somewhere else might be a better idea, perhaps somewhere where you could do fishing and hunting.
If there's enough sun and/or wind, electricity should not be an issue, as it would be provided by solar panels. As for any important machinery you should have spare parts, and you should have backup systems
I was also thinking about the possibility of running a online service in such a place, what about an anonymous e-mail system. I guess the sat connection could be cancelled should anyone want to shut you down, but how would they find your location, if it could not easily be found in any official registry (imagine land was purchased through an unrelated company).
Sure, a lot of work to make something like this work.
I remember I saw a youtube video of a man living like this, can't find it again though.
Do anyone of you know of anyone that did something like this?
Perhaps it is just a romantic idea to do something like this, but being self sufficient must be really great, and not having noisy people around and no mailbox and no bills, it would be super great.
