Could this be our Gulch?
Pitcairn Island was made famous by the novel "Mutiny on the Bounty." Imagine the possibilities. Britain might be happy to grant it independence. Imagine a few nuclear reactors. A small ship yard and a steel mill. Some high rise living and it could work. We could truly hide in plain sight. How would you develope the island?
Previous comments...
I think if you really want to build a real live Gulch, then the idea a retaking control of an Island like Australia away from the new world order would be more in reality. They are the real problem for the whole world.
http://www.amazon.com/Island-Thomas-Perr...
All the basics involving the siting of a community in 'international' waters are covered from planning, first drop of landfill, maintaining sovereignty, attracting interesting people, dealing with nearby countries... right up to a hostile invasion! It's all here and is a surprisingly readable, riveting adventure.
It's never sustained more than 200 people, so all infrastructure would be needed from scratch, and at the same time, about the most difficult place on earth to get raw materials to.
I don't see it happening. We'd be better off with a floating oil platform type idea I've seen (but anchored closer to civilization).
On the plus, food would be easy to grow -but if water is scarce, it gets tough... hydroponics are now known to scale well.
google map at -25.069001,-130.106535
Job may be available:
"The only currently qualified high voltage electricity technician on the Pitcairn island, who manages the electricity grid, has now reached the retirement age."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pitcairn_Is...
Internet is 512kb/s
As long as you don't need netflix, that's doable. Might be able to improve on that.
Provide a secure/private email service, and charge outsiders for it, and you might have a revenue stream. Charge in Bitcoins.
"The Pitcairn Miscellany reports that despite the bandwidth recently being doubled to 512 kbit/s this is not per user but is in fact shared between all families on the island making normal internet use extremely difficult."
This is another area requiring either lower expectations or significant capital expenditure.
You can also go Satellite. It might not be too bad or expensive
I am likely less tolerant of wasted bandwidth than most others here. Many web pages these days will not even work properly without megabytes of image garbage. When I see a page loading slowly I watch the megabyte counter that appears on my browser. It is rare that I see a page that loads without megabytes and megabytes of bandwidth wasting uncompressed images. (The Gulch is exceptionally good.) Getting broadband is not automatic for a small audience. New Zealand has bandwidth limits on nearly all accounts because they are 'off the beaten path.' That is a first world country with 3 million customers and they could not justify an upgraded cable for the coutry recently. A mid ocean Atlantean settlement of a few thousand will not have adequate service unless much better technology is developed for remote areas.
Do I think that a broadband internet is vital for Atlantis? No, but without it residents and businesses may find it much harder to compete.
The 3D printers could print parts for industrial robots, which when assembled and commissioned, would then take over the 3D printers to print even more robots, which would then use the printers to create parts to build more 3D printers, and so on.
That, and a silicon foundry for creating silicon chips and semiconductors on demand, because both 3D printers and robots need them, as well as much of the general goods that the mill will produce.
http://www.spacedaily.com/reports/Austra...