I'm fairly certain that this is not serious, but a serious discussion of the logistics is nice to have without it devolving into blowing up the moon using kitten powered missiles from Mars. I would not be a candidate to actually move onto B12 land, at least not from the get-go. I am a family man, and raising kids is hard enough in the city, let alone in the wilderness.
As far as the embark site goes, I'd prefer A) wooded area, although it doesn't have to be super dense, B) fresh water, preferably running, and C) either a cave or a rocky outcropping to get started with.
A)Woodlands have lots and lots of resources. Food is plentiful in both plant and animal form. Trees don't grow without water, of course, so you're very likely to find that, too. Wood, of course, is highly useful and versatile, even in its raw form. That said, log structures (which are the obvious candidate for permanent structures unless we're going to mine clay for bricks, or quarry rocks or something, and both of those require industrial output to get the quantity we need,) take a ton of logs to make. We're talking hundreds, if not thousands, depending on just how big you want to build. I'd imagine that there would be a lot of people who don't want to live in a one-room house with everyone else. Therefore, we need lots of wood. Therefore, we need lots of trees. And chainsaws. Stumps are extremely hard to break up, and you'd hope that someone would show up with a truck powerful enough to just yank them out of the ground with a chain. Maybe we could use Sirus' party truck.
B) This should be a no brainer. We'd need a lot of water, depending on how many people we have. Drinking, cooking, sanitation, cleaning clothes and bathing, growing crops (even in a garden,) watering animals if we domesticated any or had pets, the list goes on. Water is essential, and running water is likely to be cleaner than swamp water (and less mosquito infested,) unless you live downstream from industry. If the stream is big enough, it's also a food source. Hello, fish, water fowl, and other animals that need a drink. That's not to mention all the other resources you can gather from water sources, like small stones, reeds, and other marshy fibrous plants that you're unlikely to find elsewhere. A lake would be pretty awesome, too. Canoes aren't super hard to make unless you want them pretty, and fishing from the surface of a lake is not only relaxing, but also resource gathering at the same time. Aside from that, some of you guys swim. I don't, but it's a nice consideration.
C) Shelter should be another no brainer, as it takes time to build a permanent structure. You have to have somewhere to stay in the mean time, and you don't really want to freeze to death or get eaten alive by insects (or other wildlife) while you sleep. Furthermore, caves are often home to other water sources, as well as small animals that you can hunt or gather other resources from. Bat guano in particular is extremely useful, and despite my dislike of bats, they're also pretty good to have around to keep the insect population in check. Caverns in general can also have exposed resources of things that can be very important, like rock salt. I wouldn't go striking the earth without putting up proper supports (which, again, is going to require a lot of wood that we won't have and possibly metal bracings for the beams,) but harvesting surface deposits should be relatively harmless.
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Topic: The Bay12 Island Project (Read 16928 times)