Welcome to the land that no country wants: Bir Tawil (2016)

I would suggest to people that want to colonize mars that we try a self-sustaining colony at Bir Tawil first. Of course it would need a sufficient budget, in USD or EUR per year, and cooperation from the adjacent governments for over-land transport of supplies and construction materials. Not for the purpose of trying to claim it as a sovereign state (silly idea), but as a proof of concept on the volume of material/logistics involved and to stress-test the technology…

> On Egyptian maps, Bir Tawil is shown as belonging to Sudan. On Sudanese maps, it appears as part of Egypt. In practice, Bir Tawil is widely believed to have the legal status of terra nullius – “nobody’s land” – and there is nothing else quite like it on the planet. This is wrong and the article later corrects itself: > Their ties to the area may be based on traditional rather than written claims – but Bir Tawil is…

A legal resolution would establish which country has owned it the entire time the conflicting claims have been around, not just from that point forward. So it's not really unclaimed, it's just Schrödinger guest starring in an episode of the hit TV show, The Westphalian Wing.

My new hobby: going on hiking trips to uninhabited patches of desert and extrapolating as much drama from them as possible on social media