What is the most self sufficient island on the planet?
Scenario: this island is cut off from the rest of humanity (magic, war, space alien zoo, etc)
Which island is in the best position to maintain its civilization? Industry? Technology?
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North Sentinel Island.
Not only would they just continue living as before, they wouldn't even realize something had changed.
I guess you win this game.
They see planes fly over every so often so those would stop.
Yea, they basically already self isolate sooo it'd just be another Tuesday for them lmao
Ireland isn't bad from a basic survival perspective - massive food surplus and plenty of water - but if we wanted to maintain current living standards, I think we would fall down on power as it stands currently. Plenty of natural wind and tidal power resources that are underutilised.
Just make sure those pesky British stay out of your potatoes
It was our grain that they were taking. The potatoes were attacked by fungus.
I'd say we'd need to make a bunch of biofuels to fill the immediate shortfall to keep tractors moving but as you say we've plenty of really good quality land, water, wind. Lots of chemical and medical processing capability once we have the raw ingredients for medicines etc.
Main medium term issue would be mineral and metal mining and processing as we're short on that but yeah overall think we'd be basically fine.
‘Stralia
Straya^
Australia easily
The secret to being a successful island is a greater landmass than most countries on Earth.
Eurasia
Ah yes. This island earth.
What's the smallest section of earth you would think could thrive in this scenario?
I don't know enough small islands. Something with a population of at least 5000 and a fishing-based economy is probably a good start.
North Sentinel Island
I think Iceland is a strong choice. It has power and rare earth resources
How much grain imports, how much petrol for fishing boats?
They could probably use some of that thermal energy to power lighting that would grow some veggies and other low-resource plants. Although they probably aren't set up for that today.
ETA: Turns out they are set up to use thermal energy to generate their own food, which actually makes a lot of sense given how resourceful they are as a people.
They already do actually!
https://gastrogays.com/fridheimar-iceland/
https://www.vaxa.co/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varmaland
Cba adding more but they are rather good at it
Gastro gays? Sounds wild
Or just a fancy way to say canibal?
In such scenarios, distance is probably an advantage so I would go with Hawaii if it is an option. There's good diving too.
Island of Utopia.
Outstanding reference. Meanwhile, the rest of us are still on islands where people argue about whether helping each other is economically feasible.
They relied on regular shipments of supplies. At least the stations did. Even during Desmond's time
Saving this thread to my "just in case" list.
Great Britain
Was gonna say Australia too
Define island. Contiinents are just big islands.
The first definition.
I guess that means continents are islands.
Does that mean now that we have the Panama canal that North and South America are separate islands?
The canal's above sea level, isn't it? Wouldn't that just make it a river that goes over the continental divide?
Depends how pedantic we want to be with the definition I guess.
In that case, it would be Africa, Europe, and Asia, since it's all connected.
Galapagos (without humans, of course!)
England
1 - England is not an island, you mean Great Britain.
2 - Almost half the food eaten in the UK has been imported from overseas.
3 - A large proportion (it's difficult to get exact figures and it fluctuates) of energy is imported from abroad in the forms of oil and gas.
Great Britain, and the wider UK, has not been self sufficient for ~600 years relying on colonialism and a maritime empire to meet its needs and trade since it collapsed. If it had to rely on resources available within the island it would collapse in days.
Borneo. Still mostly agricultural but from a survivability POV, even though it would be blasted back to before the Industrial revolution, it's got everything needed.
australia.