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More like blast from the past than current burning culture war battle, but one interesting fact dropped from court documents concerning FTX effective altruist saga.
Sam Bankman-Fried wanted to buy the nation of Nauru to wait out the world's end
Dead bird thread
This article is more clickbaity and sensational than factual, actual quote from the court documents docket 1886 - "Adversary case 23-50448. Complaint by FTX Trading Ltd., Alameda Research LLC" is:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/8NgFWTk2puBG5eSJA/ftx-foundation-wanted-to-buy-the-nation-of-nauru-to-save-eas
Hard to imagine worse place to be stuck in the case of TEOTWAWKI that deserted and devastated island that lacks even drinkable water.
It was never a serious plan, nothing more than one of many ideas brainstormed among elite human capital of FTX Foundation, but it is symptomatic as for elite thought and for their beliefs that everything and everyone is for sale. As people on EA forum pointed up, it could achieve nothing than give EA a bad name (if it already hadn't one).
We are not any more in the Holy Roman Empire, selling and buying sovereign principalities is, legally, not a thing anymore and trading land between sovereign states is also thing of the past.
Last case was in 1791, when Christian Friedrich Carl Alexander, last margrave of Brandenburg-Ansbach sold his country to Prussia so he could enjoy comfy retirement in England (stereotypical boomer behavior, but probably the smartest move at the time).
If the world is ending, why would you even need to be on 'sovereign territory'? By definition this scenario involves the collapse of government which means that you want a lightly defended, low population country in a place that probably won't be tier-1 priority for nukes, where you can survive year round and where things will grow naturally.
Honestly there aren't many options. The only two I can think of are rural parts of New Zealand's South Island (where Thiel and the other billionaire preppers have already bought compounds around Lake Wanaka) and Patagonia.
The problem with the pacific islands is that their carrying capacity is very limited - a truly remote pacific island that was never mined or deforested for cash crops could probably support a very small population indefinitely, but there aren't many of them left. Nauru has 11,000 people and relies very heavily on imports for most food. There are some uninhabited islands in French Polynesia one could purchase. You'd still be in France, though. There are some good islands off Fiji, but the problem is they're too close to the very densely inhabited main island which will have 700,000 hungry people on it.
Parts of rural Australia fit the bill, I’d think- not a lot of people around, unlikely to get nuked and if they do it’ll just be like Sidney and Brisbane, will have lots of farmers after the end.
So would large parts of the interior of the US, especially if you have a huge budget to invest in facilities up front.
I think the risk is that regions of the US that are ideal are often actually quite near the location of US nuclear missile silos. A lot of rural land especially in depopulated parts of the West is also national parks or otherwise protected. This is also the problem with parts of Southwestern Canada, for example.
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