> Love this idea and wondering where that low cost of living place would be
Parts of Africa and India are very much like that. I would guess other places too. I'd pick a hill station in India, or maybe some place higher up in sub-Saharan Africa (above the insects)
> What problem are we trying to solve that is not possible right now?
The point is more about identifying the problem, actually. An independent tech tree will have vastly different capabilities and limitations than the existing one.
Continuing the thought experiment -- to be much more abstract now -- if we placed an independent colony of humans on Venus 150 years ago, it's likely computing would be very different. If the transistor weren't invented, we might have optical, mechanical, or fluidic computation, or perhaps some extended version of vacuum tubes. Everything would be different.
Sharing technology back-and-forth a century later would be amazing.
Even when universities were more isolated, something like 1995-era MIT computing infrastructure was largely homebrew, with fascinating social dynamics around things like Zephyr, interesting distributed file systems (AFS), etc. The X Window System came out of it too, more-or-less, which in turn allowed for various types of work with remote access unlike those we have with the cloud.
And there were tech trees build around Lisp-based computers / operating systems, SmallTalk, and systems where literally everything was modifiable.
More conservatively, even the interacting Chinese and non-Chinese tech trees are somewhat different (WeChat, Alipay, etc. versus WhatsApp, Venmo, etc.)
You can't predict the future, and having two independent futures seems like a great way to have progress.
Plus, it prevents a monoculture. Perhaps that's the problem I'm trying to solve.
> Do we start from hardware at the CPU ?
For the actual thought experiment, too expensive. I'd probably offer monitors, keyboards, mice, and some kind of relatively simple, documented microcontroller to drive those. As well as things like ADCs, DACs, and similar.
Zero software, except what's needed to bootstrap.