A Nomad Future
On the coming buyer’s market of food secured living spaces and their travelable global network
Lifetimes of debt and human-created restraints were starting to become something from an older age. For the modern man, the fourth industrial revolution was paving the road to a freedom unknown.
Going off-grid and leaving the rat race of modernity behind once meant becoming a renegade, a lone stranger. Now, an alternative grid existed. Composed of self-sustaining nodes, it delivered an abundance that could be traveled. We walked the Earth together and home was everywhere.
Summer 2025 — “How do you escape? We do not buy things with money but with hours from our life. Repetitive commutes and routines.” Biking to work Eva made an unexpected turn, she chose to follow a different road, tired of the unfulfilling sameness of her life. “So many hours spent to obtain and renovate Nature given rights, she thought.” “Why should walls and a ceiling be so expensive?” “A lifetime of a willingly chosen sentence to surrender so many years of my life to pay for a roof over my head and be grounded” “Years I could otherwise spend learning something I am passionate about, traveling or investing my time in creating something meaningful” She said to herself, thinking about the mortgage commitment she would sign later that day. “Aren’t we smart enough to do these things differently?” “Can’t we think of a better way?” “Once we were nomads and we found our livelihood all around us — we chased the setting sun and followed our instinct to walk ahead and find better undiscovered lands.” “We were explorers, innate travelers”. “Now we are stuck in the same circular road, in the same laberynth, whilst we look at our mobile screens yearning access to experiences that we artificially restrict ourselves from — we yearn those spaces in time that our wider than our four walls — the pool with the idyllic view, the paradisiacal beach, the breathtaking landscape of an endless horizon.” Perhaps not everyone thought the same, but that is how she felt. Trapped. She had decided to get off the common path and find an alternate way.
Only change is constant. The world of today will not be the world tomorrow. Technology transforms our civilization. How could today’s standards of livelihood become the parallel to a nascent alternative that could offer less dependency on high renting and mortgage payments, on repetitve commutes and offer a new way for food security? What if it was ordinary for costum 3D printed housing to be built over a weekend and for food growth systems to be an indispensable part our homes? Programmable smart aeroponic “food computers” would grow most if not all of our food year round, controlling within our personal closed-loop greenhouses climate conditions to grow a diverse array of nutrient rich vegetables, algae and fish.
The advancement of future-living technologies would make these customizable and food-secured living spaces affordable — bringing about a buyer’s market for housing. The Dutch city of Eindhoven will see the beginnings, where the first commercial housing project based on 3D-concrete printing is to take place. In the near future we will be able to own more than one of these inexpensive food-secured homes, being thus able to trade them and share our vacant spaces, in one open and hospitable travelable network where home would be extended and global.
This is how that future may look like:
Five years later Eva and her girlfriend Clara entered “the network”. They had purchased one self-sufficient printed solar home and a latest generation smart farm. For the former they had bought a design inspired by cycladic architecture — an Oía cave house, complete with a small inside pool. The building now in a flash drive they held in their palms and it felt as though their future home was to sprout and grow from a seed. Parts that could not be printed like windows, the kitchen, compost toilet, air water harvesting system, electrical wiring and solar panels had arrived first by self-driving truck — much of the furniture like the bed base, dining table and cabinets would be seamlessly amalgamated with the floors and walls of the structure, in one organic seashell like form.
The bus-size printer they had rented from a co-ownership of seven visionary investors, who lived in different parts of the world —a state of the art Chinese million dollar machine. Anybody disinclined to be sentenced to a life of mortgage payments wanted one of these, if mortgages were not soon to be history. After all the housing market was going down and it semmed it was destined to plummet. The culprits were novel building technologies which could erect a house in hours, and from a mere pile of earth. 3D printing and robotization were the new game changers. With the design downloaded into the printer and the bar code of the container with the house parts scanned for these to be identified, mapped into the design and correctly positioned during the construction by the printer’s robotic arm, the magic began. In three days the house had been completed — to their incredulous eyes it had semmed as if their home was alive and growing out from a dune of sand just to freeze, in one biotic and alluringly convoluted shape, at a day’s end with the rise of the moon.
3D printing with in-situ materials was turning construction dirt cheap. Banks were struggling to convince their customers that there would always be high demand for housing at the heart of big urban centers. They talked about an inextinguishable market of buyers, of non-commuters, who would not pay less for a home out-of-town. They wouldn’t mention the imminent end of traffic. Meaning the new underground highways being built to and from the suburbs, which would transport single automobiles on individual maglev trolley-like platforms at high speeds. Or that the state-of-the-art 3D printed ultramodern mansion “out there” would soon cost less than an apartment in “SoHo”. Houses were now becoming a commodity. Would buying entire depreciated residential buildings only to demolish them and print surrealist multi-storey homes be soon a trend among the millionaires?
Eva and Clara’s home had been printed in the Horizons self-sustaining community located in Naeroyfjord, Norway. Under the released land act they could freely build for residential purposes in special areas, if done sustainably and by integrating architecture into the natural landscape.
It had all cost them 15 thousand dollars to be precise — the food security — that is their smart farm explained below — the house design, the solar panels, the house parts, the renting of the printer and the printing. A previously implausable investment to achieve a life of travel and “retirement” — a wonderful and, at and same time, untold future. Where they to become the owners of their life or simply outcasts of society? This new parallel world of open doors was growing in numbers and what if it was here to stay and replace the old one? All those neo-nomads saying less was more, who traveled this liberated network of food secured living spaces chasing the setting sun and who read the book of Earth, beyond its preface, seemed happier. Or so it appeared to the old-world 8am zombies.
Visualize an iphone turned into a greenhouse, that’s what a smart farm was — state of the art aerogel greenhouses — individual 12 square meter food growing systems.
Aerogel was the new plastic — the material of the century. A magnificent insulator also used for the big domes that sheltered the 219 Martian and Lunar off-world colonists. A thickness of one cm of the solid was able to effortlessly maintain tropical temperatures under its smokey-looking appearance. A few hours of sun exposure a day — even during a harsh nordic winter was all the warmth that was needed to yield tomatoes under the aurora borealis. One aerogel greenhouse sheltered two-floor-high racks packed with colourful nutrient rich microgreens, vegetables and spirulina filled tubes. With its transluscent body, narrow shape and inverted V ceiling, it resembled a ghostly Dutch house of hanging gardens — tilapia fish in a tank procured with their waste nutrient rich water for the plants and the plant roots purified in return, the water for the fish. Proteins, carbs and veggies all thrived in a clever, self-contained biosphere which occupied only 12 square meters — the “off-grid engine”
Smart sensors everywhere, like a nervous system, measured and maintained the right conditions for the survival of this living and breathing jungle in a box. In high buildings or the countryside, these extensions of the human body, these smart micro farms had become our chloroplasts, effortlessly capturing sunlight and turning it into an energetic, balanced and nutritious weekly harvest that could be accessed like one would open the refrigerator door — a revolutionary replacement to grocery shopping.
Eva and Clara’s greenhouse, gleamed with its quasicrystal battery powered LED horticultural lights under a cold Norwegian night. Up in the sky Mars shined red. To think that someone looking up from there at a blue dot Earth would be eating from the same type of shielded food garden, made them feel part of something much bigger than themselves — of the future of mankind.
Their personal food farm was capable of feeding more than its regular users — one more person, when in “full mode”. The founding idea behind the Network was hospitality — being able to welcome and host other nomads facilitated freedom of movement and community. Personal surplus was otherwise sold or recycled as energy or fertilizer. While away from their starting node their smart farm and home stayed open for other Earth-citizens of the Network. In return, they could also check-in at vacant homes and greenhouses or otherwise camp at communities with available food surplus.
The idea was that, in this alternate grid, there had to be more food secured sustainable houses than people, as it would be common to invest in more than one at different locations worldwide, creating an abundance of connected and travelable “Internet of Things” living spaces. Entering the buyer’s market, food secured homes were now as expensive as electric cars and they were meant to become even cheaper with further advances in 3D printing. It was only a matter of years before things started drastically changing, for better or worse. These liberating technologies would not thrive without many people loosing money. The house you had paid for years would be soon worth your year’s salary. A global recession loomed by the clock.
Things like wine, cheese or cashew nuts were hard to let go. However, being free of rental payments, energy bills and grocery shopping if they wanted to, they had enough in savings to comfortably leave the rat race for a long while. In fact this was allowing people to directly invest in the experiences they wanted to have. They had crowd-funded a fully automated Norwegian brewery that did drone deliveries. Other couple in their community had co-founded a shared 3D printed boutique-like retreat by the Adriatic sea. Before you would be able to live one month a year. Now, liberated from the costs of living — the chains of making a living — a new twilight of possibilities was starting to shine its crepuscular rays on a worn out 21st century, one of a universal search of more freedom and control over otherwise lives that controlled us.
Their solar powered electric auto and bikes were a fundamental addition to their new life. They were going on a grand tour through the Network, stopping at different self-sustaining villages in Norway and then the rest of Europe. Having prepared a bag filled with jarred preserves and which also contained all their possessions they would first head north towards the midnight sun with a group of seven other neo-nomads. They were tired of the old way — of the so called work-life balance which put the word work before life. They had decided to be the pioneers and escape the old 38 hour work week and travel indefinitely through this self-sustaining global system.
Having arrived at their next destination, a vacant food-secured apartment awaited them. They checked-in video calling at the door’s screen, through which the original owners, another couple who was now in Brazil, welcomed them to their new temporary dwelling — a spacious place in the 5th floor of a self-sustaining building that had been crowdfunded and also built by 3D printer in the city of Tromsø, above the Artic Circle. The floor had been vacant for two months and Eva and Clara had already sent by drone the seeds of the vegetables they wanted to eat — the right climate for their growth had been programmed by the smart farm. They could see them sprouting uder sun rays filtering through the greenery that sorrounded their circular flat.
They would hike and explore the sorrounding fjords and the city and meet the local community of fellow nomads. Their next chapter would be their next destination. Eva and Clara had become the owners of their mornings and their time and their backyard was now planet-size.
