Slashdot Mirror

From the article: "Space doesn't belong to the military industrial complex," Smith told me. "It belongs to humanity, it belongs to anyone who wants to go there. There's an extreme frustration in me that there's an entire universe out there to explore and the only way to get there is through these existing systems, these highly formalized systems that don't have a whole lot of incentive to make it easy to get there right now. I think that's a good enough reason to try this."

Nice to see some steps towards what we encouraged in 2001:
https://www.kurtz-fernhout.com...
"The continued exponential growth of technological capacity since the 1970s has removed most technical limits to group collaborations on space settlement issues. To remove social limits, groups must be explicit about the licensing terms of individual contributions and the collected work, for example putting their contributions in the public domain, or under a license like the BSD license or GPL as a conscious act. The most successful space related collaborations in the future will be ones that make these principles part of their daily operations. One result of such collaborations will be a distributed library of simulations and knowledge including specific detailed designs for self-replicating space habitat systems."

Kind of difficult sometimes to see how much design culture has changed since then one day at a time -- but it has (e.g. see also the other slashdot story from today on the move to open RISC-V cores...)

Coincidentally I posted some ideas just the other day: https://news.ycombinator.com/i...

=====

We could have a Basic Income for all so that anyone who wanted to create FOSS could without having to take a paying job. The basic income would also recognize all the contributions to society many people make which they are not compensated for (e.g. caring for sick relatives instead of sending them to nursing homes).

Or we could have better 3D printers, gardening robots, materials extractors, portable recycling equipment, and printable solar panels so that programmers making FOSS would not need to engage with the exchange economy much.

Or we could expand the gift economy (which FOSS is part of) to more of the material world (e.g. Freecycle).

Or the US government could repeal most drug laws and convert freed-up prisons into places where FOSS programmers or others who wanted to make free public digital works could hang out and get free room and board and so on (or maybe build nicer accommodations to the same goals).

Or the filing or holding of non-freely-licensed copyrights by non-profits (e.g. most universities who already employ a lot of people to do programming) could be determined to be "self-dealing" by Congress or maybe just the IRS:
https://pdfernhout.net/open-le...
"Foundations, other grantmaking agencies handling public tax-exempt dollars, and charitable donors need to consider the implications for their grantmaking or donation policies if they use a now obsolete charitable model of subsidizing proprietary publishing and proprietary research. In order to improve the effectiveness and collaborativeness of the non-profit sector overall, it is suggested these grantmaking organizations and donors move to requiring grantees to make any resulting copyrighted digital materials freely available on the internet, including free licenses granting the right for others to make and redistribute new derivative works without further permission. It is also suggested patents resulting from charitably subsidized research research also be made freely available for general use. The alternative of allowing charitable dollars to result in proprietary copyrights and proprietary patents is corrupting the non-profit sector as it results in a conflict of interest between a non-profit's primary mission of helping humanity through freely sharing knowledge (made possible at little cost by the internet) and a desire to maximize short term revenues through charging licensing fees for access to patents and copyrights. In essence, with the change of publishing and communication economics made possible by the wide spread use of the internet, tax-exempt non-profits have become, perhaps unwittingly, caught up in a new form of "self-dealing", and it is up to donors and grantmakers (and eventually lawmakers) to prevent this by requiring free licensing of results as a condition of their grants and donations."

Or in the absence of such a legal ruling, foundations and other donors could require grantees to sign a pledge to only create free and open source works:
"Pledge to only fund and create free software and free content"
https://pdfernhout.net/pledge-...

Or programmers could keep creating FOSS in their spare time both for its own sake and in the hopes the growing quantitative mass of FOSS eventually leads to a qualitative shift towards a post-scarcity society.

=====

Or something I posted around 2004:

"How to Find the Financing for Achieving the Star Trek Society"
https://www.kurtz-fernhout.com...
"This essay shows how a total of $14000 billion up front and at least another $2085 billion per year can be made available for creative investment in the USA

https://www.kurtz-fernhout.com...

From a paper I co-write in 2001: "A Review of Licensing and Collaborative Development with Special Attention to Design of Self-Replicating Space Habitat Systems"
https://www.kurtz-fernhout.com...
"The continued exponential growth of technological capacity since the 1970s has removed most technical limits to group collaborations on space settlement issues. To remove social limits, groups must be explicit about the licensing terms of individual contributions and the collected work, for example putting their contributions in the public domain, or under a license like the BSD license or GPL as a conscious act. The most successful space related collaborations in the future will be ones that make these principles part of their daily operations. One result of such collaborations will be a distributed library of simulations and knowledge including specific detailed designs for self-replicating space habitat systems."

https://www.kurtz-fernhout.com...

From a paper I co-write in 2001: "A Review of Licensing and Collaborative Development with Special Attention to Design of Self-Replicating Space Habitat Systems"
https://www.kurtz-fernhout.com...
"The continued exponential growth of technological capacity since the 1970s has removed most technical limits to group collaborations on space settlement issues. To remove social limits, groups must be explicit about the licensing terms of individual contributions and the collected work, for example putting their contributions in the public domain, or under a license like the BSD license or GPL as a conscious act. The most successful space related collaborations in the future will be ones that make these principles part of their daily operations. One result of such collaborations will be a distributed library of simulations and knowledge including specific detailed designs for self-replicating space habitat systems."

Me from 2000: http://www.dougengelbart.org/c...
Me from 2004: http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/...
Me from 2008: https://groups.google.com/foru...

Or me from 2011:
http://phibetaiota.net/2011/09...
"The greatest threat facing the USA is the irony inherent in our current defense posture, like for example planning to use nuclear energy embodied in missiles to fight over oil fields that nuclear energy could replace. This irony arises in part because the USAâ(TM)s current security logic is still based on essentially 19th century and earlier (second millennium) thinking that becomes inappropriate applied to 21st century (third millennium) technological threats and opportunities. That situation represents a systematic intelligence failure of the highest magnitude. There remains time to correct this failure, but time grows short as various exponential trends continue."

Frankly, I've spent almost twenty years on Slashdot arguing with many posters who disregarded solar energy (and other renewables, as well as energy efficiency); example of me debating that from 2013:
https://hardware.slashdot.org/...
https://hardware.slashdot.org/...

See also Amory Lovins and the Rocky Mountain Institute's work, including from 1982.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Or John Todd and the (now defunct/spunoff) New Alchemy Institute.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
"The New Alchemy Institute was a research center that did pioneering investigation into organic agriculture, aquaculture, and bioshelter design between 1969 and 1991. It was founded by John Todd, Nancy Jack Todd, and William McLarney. Its purpose was to research human support systems of food, water, and shelter and to completely rethink how these systems were designed."

And Home Power magazine. https://www.homepower.com/

Solar energy has been more and more effective in ever broader niche uses which drove its growth for decades (as Home Power magazine and others predicted years ago) -- from satellites, to calculators, to homes ten miles off-grid, to generator replacements for temporary traffic lights, to one mile-off-grid homes, to on-grid homes. Finally now that grid parity has been widely reached and it is becoming foolish in most places to install anything but solar PV for electricity generation, now everyone wakes up to what has been going on. Although even now their remain deniers here and there (as in that slashdot post linked above).

=== The bigger picture: general exponential trends across multiple technologies

As I noted in the 2000 post I made, the same exponential changes in technological capacity that drive cheaper PV also apply in other areas -- even for cheaper nuclear energy (whether from uranium, thorium or hot/cold fusion). But for the same reasons most people ignored the PV trends, most people ignore these other trends.

Here is a proposal I sent to DARPA in 1999 to try to deal with the consequences of exponential technological growth (including(as we see with North Korea recently increased capacity globally for making WMDs):
https://groups.google.com/foru...
"I agree with Hans Moravec on several points; one of them is the implications of this chart:

By me: http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/...

It's a tool for quickly editing interactive fiction that can be driven by voice recognition.

I actually applied (with mixed feelings, given Alexa's possibilities for privacy violation) to Amazon's Alexa developer funding program to port StoryHarp to Alexa's system just after Alexa came out, but nothing came of it.

See my post on Slashdot from 2005: https://slashdot.org/comments....
"So that is why I think billionaires like Jeff Bezos spending money on CATS is a tragedy -- they should IMHO be spending their money on DOGS instead (Design of Great Settlements)."

If Elon Musk wants to get to Mars, he should invest in projects like OSCOMAK (my idea, but other people have similar ones):
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/...
"The OSCOMAK project is an attempt to create a core of communities more in control of their technological destiny and its social implications. No single design for a community or technology will please everyone, or even many people. Nor would a single design be likely to survive. So this project endeavors to gather information and to develop tools and processes that all fit together conceptually like Tinkertoys or Legos. The result will be a library of possibilities that individuals in a community can use to achieve any degree of self-sufficiency and self-replication within any size community, from one person to a billion people. Within every community people will interact with these possibilities by using them and extending them to design a community economy and physical layout that suits their needs and ideas."

Build that first, then deploy automated seeds to Mars and the Moon and Asteroids, and they will come... Because there will be a reason to go there...

CATS (Cheap Access to Space) is the technological equivalent of supply-side economics.

Supply side economics is the dumb (yet brilliantly marketed) idea that if we give all out money to rich people, then stuff will trickle down eventually because they will invest in businesses and hire people. That totally ignores that anyone with provable demand for a producible product can already get a bank loan based on booked orders (as well as of course angel investments and venture capital). Give the money to people to spend, and immediately you will see businesses pop up to service that demand. What really happens when you give rich people more money is that they either do the financial equivalent of stuffing it in a matters or they gamble it in high stakes poker games with other rich people and none of it ever reaches the real economy.

CATS is about supply. The idea goes that if we can make launching people into space cheap enough, if we can make getting to Mars cheap enough, then people will go there. CATS is a dumb idea for the same reasons as supply side economics. We don't go to space because, except for a few scientists studying it and a few tourists on thrill rides, there is nothing of obvious human interest there right now.

I'm not saying cosmology or astronomy is not interesting -- it is fascinating. But if you want to study cosmology, you will almost certainly be much much happier studying such things on Earth right now than by yourself and maybe a few others cooped up in a tiny buried shack on Mars after having been irradiated for months on the way there.

If we can build great settlements on land, underground, in Antarctica, and in the oceans -- then soon enough we can build them anywhere including Mars, the Moon, and the Asteroid. Then people will move to space habitats for the same reasons people move to New York City or Austin or Paris or Amsterdam -- because they are interesting places to live around lots of interesting people doing interesting things. And once there are interesting places to go in space, then people will figure out cheaper ways to get there -- including by beaming power to Earth if needed and building space ships in space to shuttle people up from Earth.

I once calculated that we could evacuate the Earth in about ten years if we switched all our industries to the effort and accepted a 1% - 5% fatality rate (same as ocean voyages to the "New World" centuries ago). So, the issue is not the cost of getting into space. The issue is that there is no pl

I had not know DMOZ was the early basis of some part of Google... Sad to see the loss of the scaffolding of the web -- but it is true that communities move on or at least individuals do. Glad Archive.org and others are making a copy of it -- but you can't as easily make an archival copy of a community.

One issue with DMOZ was that you got (at the time) at most two listings per item. The book "The Disciple of Organizing" shows instead how one can have a facet-based approach with multiple categories instead of, or in addition to, to a single hierarchical one.

Some of our listing for work by my wife and I from way back when (and the sadness is also much more for remaining unrealized potential on the projects -- still wanting to redo them in JavaScript for the browser -- than just DMOZ's passing):
http://www.dmoz.org/search?q=k...

Kurtz-Fernhout Software
Formerly commercial programs now available for free. Garden with Insight is a garden simulator, and PlantStudio is botanical illustration software.
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/
Home > Gardening > Landscaping
[That should really have been under Science > Software > Simulation]

Embedded Squeak, Speech Synthesizer
By Kurtz-Fernhout Software: version 1.0 for Squeak 2.2, by Paul Fernhout. Zip file has standalone Exe file to run Squeak in Win95 text-only console, and all source code (VC++ 5.0, Squeak 2.2) to produce it. [Open Source, Squeak license]
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/...
Computers > Programming > Languages > Smalltalk > Squeak > Software

PlantStudio
Tool for creating pictures of 3D plants. It simulates herbaceous (non-woody) plants like wildflowers and cut flowers, vegetables, weeds, grasses, and herbs using a parameter-driven simulation of plant growth and structure.
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/...
Computers > Software > Graphics > 3D > Rendering and Modelling

StoryHarp Audioventure Interactive Fiction
Voice-operated interactive fiction including text-to-speech, sounds and music.
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/...
Games > Video Games > Adventure > Text Adventures > Design and Development > Authoring Systems

OSCOMAK: Open Source Community On Manufacturing Knowledge
Goal: create a distributed global repository of production knowledge of past, present and future processes, materials, products.
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/...
Computers > Open Source > Open Content

I had not know DMOZ was the early basis of some part of Google... Sad to see the loss of the scaffolding of the web -- but it is true that communities move on or at least individuals do. Glad Archive.org and others are making a copy of it -- but you can't as easily make an archival copy of a community.

One issue with DMOZ was that you got (at the time) at most two listings per item. The book "The Disciple of Organizing" shows instead how one can have a facet-based approach with multiple categories instead of, or in addition to, to a single hierarchical one.

Some of our listing for work by my wife and I from way back when (and the sadness is also much more for remaining unrealized potential on the projects -- still wanting to redo them in JavaScript for the browser -- than just DMOZ's passing):
http://www.dmoz.org/search?q=k...

Kurtz-Fernhout Software
Formerly commercial programs now available for free. Garden with Insight is a garden simulator, and PlantStudio is botanical illustration software.
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/
Home > Gardening > Landscaping
[That should really have been under Science > Software > Simulation]

Embedded Squeak, Speech Synthesizer
By Kurtz-Fernhout Software: version 1.0 for Squeak 2.2, by Paul Fernhout. Zip file has standalone Exe file to run Squeak in Win95 text-only console, and all source code (VC++ 5.0, Squeak 2.2) to produce it. [Open Source, Squeak license]
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/...
Computers > Programming > Languages > Smalltalk > Squeak > Software

PlantStudio
Tool for creating pictures of 3D plants. It simulates herbaceous (non-woody) plants like wildflowers and cut flowers, vegetables, weeds, grasses, and herbs using a parameter-driven simulation of plant growth and structure.
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/...
Computers > Software > Graphics > 3D > Rendering and Modelling

StoryHarp Audioventure Interactive Fiction
Voice-operated interactive fiction including text-to-speech, sounds and music.
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/...
Games > Video Games > Adventure > Text Adventures > Design and Development > Authoring Systems

OSCOMAK: Open Source Community On Manufacturing Knowledge
Goal: create a distributed global repository of production knowledge of past, present and future processes, materials, products.
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/...
Computers > Open Source > Open Content

I had not know DMOZ was the early basis of some part of Google... Sad to see the loss of the scaffolding of the web -- but it is true that communities move on or at least individuals do. Glad Archive.org and others are making a copy of it -- but you can't as easily make an archival copy of a community.

One issue with DMOZ was that you got (at the time) at most two listings per item. The book "The Disciple of Organizing" shows instead how one can have a facet-based approach with multiple categories instead of, or in addition to, to a single hierarchical one.

Some of our listing for work by my wife and I from way back when (and the sadness is also much more for remaining unrealized potential on the projects -- still wanting to redo them in JavaScript for the browser -- than just DMOZ's passing):
http://www.dmoz.org/search?q=k...

Kurtz-Fernhout Software
Formerly commercial programs now available for free. Garden with Insight is a garden simulator, and PlantStudio is botanical illustration software.
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/
Home > Gardening > Landscaping
[That should really have been under Science > Software > Simulation]

Embedded Squeak, Speech Synthesizer
By Kurtz-Fernhout Software: version 1.0 for Squeak 2.2, by Paul Fernhout. Zip file has standalone Exe file to run Squeak in Win95 text-only console, and all source code (VC++ 5.0, Squeak 2.2) to produce it. [Open Source, Squeak license]
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/...
Computers > Programming > Languages > Smalltalk > Squeak > Software

PlantStudio
Tool for creating pictures of 3D plants. It simulates herbaceous (non-woody) plants like wildflowers and cut flowers, vegetables, weeds, grasses, and herbs using a parameter-driven simulation of plant growth and structure.
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/...
Computers > Software > Graphics > 3D > Rendering and Modelling

StoryHarp Audioventure Interactive Fiction
Voice-operated interactive fiction including text-to-speech, sounds and music.
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/...
Games > Video Games > Adventure > Text Adventures > Design and Development > Authoring Systems

OSCOMAK: Open Source Community On Manufacturing Knowledge
Goal: create a distributed global repository of production knowledge of past, present and future processes, materials, products.
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/...
Computers > Open Source > Open Content

I had not know DMOZ was the early basis of some part of Google... Sad to see the loss of the scaffolding of the web -- but it is true that communities move on or at least individuals do. Glad Archive.org and others are making a copy of it -- but you can't as easily make an archival copy of a community.

One issue with DMOZ was that you got (at the time) at most two listings per item. The book "The Disciple of Organizing" shows instead how one can have a facet-based approach with multiple categories instead of, or in addition to, to a single hierarchical one.

Some of our listing for work by my wife and I from way back when (and the sadness is also much more for remaining unrealized potential on the projects -- still wanting to redo them in JavaScript for the browser -- than just DMOZ's passing):
http://www.dmoz.org/search?q=k...

Kurtz-Fernhout Software
Formerly commercial programs now available for free. Garden with Insight is a garden simulator, and PlantStudio is botanical illustration software.
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/
Home > Gardening > Landscaping
[That should really have been under Science > Software > Simulation]

Embedded Squeak, Speech Synthesizer
By Kurtz-Fernhout Software: version 1.0 for Squeak 2.2, by Paul Fernhout. Zip file has standalone Exe file to run Squeak in Win95 text-only console, and all source code (VC++ 5.0, Squeak 2.2) to produce it. [Open Source, Squeak license]
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/...
Computers > Programming > Languages > Smalltalk > Squeak > Software

PlantStudio
Tool for creating pictures of 3D plants. It simulates herbaceous (non-woody) plants like wildflowers and cut flowers, vegetables, weeds, grasses, and herbs using a parameter-driven simulation of plant growth and structure.
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/...
Computers > Software > Graphics > 3D > Rendering and Modelling

StoryHarp Audioventure Interactive Fiction
Voice-operated interactive fiction including text-to-speech, sounds and music.
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/...
Games > Video Games > Adventure > Text Adventures > Design and Development > Authoring Systems

OSCOMAK: Open Source Community On Manufacturing Knowledge
Goal: create a distributed global repository of production knowledge of past, present and future processes, materials, products.
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/...
Computers > Open Source > Open Content

I had not know DMOZ was the early basis of some part of Google... Sad to see the loss of the scaffolding of the web -- but it is true that communities move on or at least individuals do. Glad Archive.org and others are making a copy of it -- but you can't as easily make an archival copy of a community.

One issue with DMOZ was that you got (at the time) at most two listings per item. The book "The Disciple of Organizing" shows instead how one can have a facet-based approach with multiple categories instead of, or in addition to, to a single hierarchical one.

Some of our listing for work by my wife and I from way back when (and the sadness is also much more for remaining unrealized potential on the projects -- still wanting to redo them in JavaScript for the browser -- than just DMOZ's passing):
http://www.dmoz.org/search?q=k...

Kurtz-Fernhout Software
Formerly commercial programs now available for free. Garden with Insight is a garden simulator, and PlantStudio is botanical illustration software.
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/
Home > Gardening > Landscaping
[That should really have been under Science > Software > Simulation]

Embedded Squeak, Speech Synthesizer
By Kurtz-Fernhout Software: version 1.0 for Squeak 2.2, by Paul Fernhout. Zip file has standalone Exe file to run Squeak in Win95 text-only console, and all source code (VC++ 5.0, Squeak 2.2) to produce it. [Open Source, Squeak license]
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/...
Computers > Programming > Languages > Smalltalk > Squeak > Software

PlantStudio
Tool for creating pictures of 3D plants. It simulates herbaceous (non-woody) plants like wildflowers and cut flowers, vegetables, weeds, grasses, and herbs using a parameter-driven simulation of plant growth and structure.
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/...
Computers > Software > Graphics > 3D > Rendering and Modelling

StoryHarp Audioventure Interactive Fiction
Voice-operated interactive fiction including text-to-speech, sounds and music.
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/...
Games > Video Games > Adventure > Text Adventures > Design and Development > Authoring Systems

OSCOMAK: Open Source Community On Manufacturing Knowledge
Goal: create a distributed global repository of production knowledge of past, present and future processes, materials, products.
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/...
Computers > Open Source > Open Content

See: http://overpopulationisamyth.c...

In general, as Julian Simon wrote, the (educated, nourished, healthy) human imagination is the ultimate resource that invents all other resources, so in general the more people you have, the more imagination you have. For example, woudl we have the internet if someone in the 1600s had decided there were too many people because London was overcrowded and killed off all but a million humans on the planet? The solar system can probably support quadrillions of people living in space habitats that can duplicate themselves from sunlight and asteroidal ore like JD Bernal imagined in the 1920s.
http://www.juliansimon.com/wri...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...
http://www.islandone.org/MMSG/...
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/...

That list is very similar to what I had listed here in back in 1999 (minus a few fanciful ones):
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/...
"The race is on to make the human world a better (and more resilient) place before one of these overwhelms us:
        Autonomous military robots out of control
        Nanotechnology virus / gray slime
        Ethnically targeted virus
        Sterility virus
        Computer virus
        Asteroid impact
        Y2K
        Other unforseen computer failure mode
        Global warming / climate change / flooding
        Nuclear / biological war
        Unexpected economic collapse from Chaos effects
        Terrorism w/ unforseen wide effects
        Out of control bureaucracy (1984)
        Religious / philosophical warfare
        Economic imbalance leading to world war
        Arms race leading to world war
        Zero-point energy tap out of control
        Time-space information system spreading failure effect (Chalker's Zinder Nullifier)
        Unforseen consequences of research (energy, weapons, informational, biological)"

But in the end, I think the issue raised in my sig is the biggest challenge: the perilous irony of people using the tools of material abundance in a war-like way as if material scarcity was still a major concern, as well as derivative issues like the moral problem of creating artificial scarcity under capitalism and so on. There are possible solutions to such issues (basic income, expanded gift economy, improved subsistence via 3D printing and personal agricultural robots and indoor agriculture and solar panels and so on, participatory democratic planning supported by the internet), but ideology and existing artificial-scarcity-based power structures stands in the way. Still, the dominant ideology is slowly shifting top a more open and abundance-oriented one. As Buckminster Fuller said decades ago, whether it will be Utopia or Oblivion will be a touch-and-go relay race to the very end...

See: http://overpopulationisamyth.c...

In general, as Julian Simon wrote, the (educated, nourished, healthy) human imagination is the ultimate resource that invents all other resources, so in general the more people you have, the more imagination you have. For example, woudl we have the internet if someone in the 1600s had decided there were too many people because London was overcrowded and killed off all but a million humans on the planet? The solar system can probably support quadrillions of people living in space habitats that can duplicate themselves from sunlight and asteroidal ore like JD Bernal imagined in the 1920s.
http://www.juliansimon.com/wri...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...
http://www.islandone.org/MMSG/...
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/...

That list is very similar to what I had listed here in back in 1999 (minus a few fanciful ones):
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/...
"The race is on to make the human world a better (and more resilient) place before one of these overwhelms us:
        Autonomous military robots out of control
        Nanotechnology virus / gray slime
        Ethnically targeted virus
        Sterility virus
        Computer virus
        Asteroid impact
        Y2K
        Other unforseen computer failure mode
        Global warming / climate change / flooding
        Nuclear / biological war
        Unexpected economic collapse from Chaos effects
        Terrorism w/ unforseen wide effects
        Out of control bureaucracy (1984)
        Religious / philosophical warfare
        Economic imbalance leading to world war
        Arms race leading to world war
        Zero-point energy tap out of control
        Time-space information system spreading failure effect (Chalker's Zinder Nullifier)
        Unforseen consequences of research (energy, weapons, informational, biological)"

But in the end, I think the issue raised in my sig is the biggest challenge: the perilous irony of people using the tools of material abundance in a war-like way as if material scarcity was still a major concern, as well as derivative issues like the moral problem of creating artificial scarcity under capitalism and so on. There are possible solutions to such issues (basic income, expanded gift economy, improved subsistence via 3D printing and personal agricultural robots and indoor agriculture and solar panels and so on, participatory democratic planning supported by the internet), but ideology and existing artificial-scarcity-based power structures stands in the way. Still, the dominant ideology is slowly shifting top a more open and abundance-oriented one. As Buckminster Fuller said decades ago, whether it will be Utopia or Oblivion will be a touch-and-go relay race to the very end...

A comment by me nine years ago on Slashdot: http://slashdot.org/comments.p...
"... So, what is a bottleneck is that we do not know how to make that seed self-replicating factory, or have plans for what it should create once it is landed on the moon or on a near-earth asteroid. We don't have (to use Bucky Fuller's terminology) a Comprehensive Anticipatory Design Science that lets us make sense of all the various manufacturing knowledge which is woven throughout our complex economy (and in practice, despite patents, is essentially horded and hidden and made proprietary whenever possible) in order to synthesize it to build elegant and flexible infrastructure for sustaining human life in style in space (or on Earth).
    So that is why I think billionaires like Jeff Bezos spending money on CATS [Cheap Access To Space] is a tragedy -- they should IMHO be spending their money on DOGS instead (Design of Great Settlements). But the designs can be done more slowly without much money using volunteers and networked personal computers -- which was the point of a SSI paper I co-authored:
            http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/... 2001_web.html
or a couple other sites I made in that direction:
        http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/...
        http://www.freevolution.net/
My work is on a shoestring, but when I imagine what even just a million dollars a year could bring in returns supporting a core team of a handful of space settlement designers, working directly on the bottleneck issues and eventually coordinating the volunteer work of hundreds or thousands more, it is frustrating to see so much money just go into just building better rockets when the ones we have already are good enough for now."

A comment by me nine years ago on Slashdot: http://slashdot.org/comments.p...
"... So, what is a bottleneck is that we do not know how to make that seed self-replicating factory, or have plans for what it should create once it is landed on the moon or on a near-earth asteroid. We don't have (to use Bucky Fuller's terminology) a Comprehensive Anticipatory Design Science that lets us make sense of all the various manufacturing knowledge which is woven throughout our complex economy (and in practice, despite patents, is essentially horded and hidden and made proprietary whenever possible) in order to synthesize it to build elegant and flexible infrastructure for sustaining human life in style in space (or on Earth).
    So that is why I think billionaires like Jeff Bezos spending money on CATS [Cheap Access To Space] is a tragedy -- they should IMHO be spending their money on DOGS instead (Design of Great Settlements). But the designs can be done more slowly without much money using volunteers and networked personal computers -- which was the point of a SSI paper I co-authored:
            http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/... 2001_web.html
or a couple other sites I made in that direction:
        http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/...
        http://www.freevolution.net/
My work is on a shoestring, but when I imagine what even just a million dollars a year could bring in returns supporting a core team of a handful of space settlement designers, working directly on the bottleneck issues and eventually coordinating the volunteer work of hundreds or thousands more, it is frustrating to see so much money just go into just building better rockets when the ones we have already are good enough for now."

Delphi had many great aspect, especially compile time. My wife and I put about six person years into a project together, much of the time working in Delphi. I knew (and even had taught at the college level C/C++), but she knew mostly Pascal. We did some work in C++, but got hit by the compile times (this was back working with PCs starting around 1995) as well as all the other issues writing in C++. Then we did some in Digitalk's Smalltalk/V, but got worried about lack of support for the proprietary version we were using (we could not have guessed that later is became a free-as-in-beer Smalltalk Express). Wish we had kept to Smalltalk though, as then we could have moved to Squeak a couple years later, and my wife and I really liked Smalltalk. But Smalltalk back then was also slow and had some other limits. So we moved to Delphi (the earliest versions, never moving to later versions beyond 2.0).

Here is GPL'd source for of our garden simulator in Delphi:
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/...

GPL'd Delphi source and translations for two other applications (PlantStudio and StoryHarp software) is here:
https://github.com/pdfernhout/...
https://github.com/pdfernhout/...

In retrospect, I think maybe we could have made the C++ approach also work better by writing unit tests for parts of the code and compiling only them in small projects. And I think I'd have much rather have the code in C++ right now than Delphi as far as long-term portability, including now translating to asm.js for web browser deployment.

But, for good or bad, I made the decision a decade ago to port it, and wrote code to parse Delphi and spit out Java and Python (doing a lot of the heavy lifting, but you need to futz with the GUI stuff and some other changes). I only got the StoryHarp app working (in a limtied way) in Java, plus I got the guts of the PlantStudio drawing algorithm in Python for a test for the OLPC.

I'm moving more into JavaScript now, for easy deployment in web browsers, so I might modify those tools to do JavaScript now? But not sure it was worth it, given the rise of Lazarus and the fact that, generally, you learn so much from writing an application that if you were to build it again, you'd do it differently.

But, in any case, Delphi was overall a pleasure to work in as far as a compiled language. Speedy. Fast turn around. Good debugging (although some library bugs with memory leaks were frustrating in the early versions -- we used memmond and its memory leak patches, plus other patches I created and found for the Delphi VCL).

When Squeak first came out, I played with generating Delphi pascal for its VM to use for Windows, but after the Windows port came out, lost some interest in that, and also got sidelines by looking into Squeak -> Newton porting. In retrospect, I wish I had finished the Squeak to Delphi port and code generation tooling, and never bothered working towards a Newton Port as the Newton OS did not want to support any more C++ than small routines, the OS's event loop conflicted with the Squeak polling architecture, Newtons had too little RAM, and of course the Newton was to be abandoned. Meanwhile, Delphi (especially via Lazarus) is still going strong!

http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/...
https://github.com/pdfernhout/...

I've been thinking about translating it to JavaScript...

Thanks for being an (indirect) inspiration, Raymond. Hope you are on to even better things!

There are a few different types of APIs involved with Linux, so it is more than the public API:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L...

Consider:
http://www.kroah.com/log/linux...
"For Linux, we don't have a stable internal api, and for people to wish that we would have one is just foolish. ... Here's an example that shows how this all works. The Linux USB code has been rewritten at least three times. We've done this over time in order to handle things that we didn't originally need to handle, like high speed devices, and just because we learned the problems of our first design, and to fix bugs and security issues. Each time we made changes in our api, we updated all of the kernel drivers that used the apis, so nothing would break. And we deleted the old functions as they were no longer needed, and did things wrong. Because of this, Linux now has the fastest USB bus speeds when you test out all of the different operating systems. We max out the hardware as fast as it can go, and you can do this from simple userspace programs, no fancy kernel driver work is needed."

And:
http://www.helixsoft.nl/blog/?...
"Linux pioneered that model: they call a stable API nonsense. The interface between drivers and the kernel changes all the time. If the Linux developers think of a better, more consistent or more efficient way to interface with the drivers they go ahead and make that change."

Thinking up "a better, more consistent or more efficient way" to interface sounds like creative work to me.

I had a similar disagreement with Alan Kay who argued that programs are mathematical. Given that for our Garden Simulator my wife spent over a year full time translating badly-named spaghetti Fortran code from EPIC to well-structured Delphi code that did essentially *exactly* the same thing, but now was understandable and maintainable, I see *enormous* benefit in naming functions, parameters, and structures well and know how long it may take to do that.
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/...
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/...

If you don't believe well-named APIs have great value, try, say, reverse engineering compacted JavaScript code. It's possible, but it takes an enormous amount of time. From another angle, most of what is written in fiction is about the same old thing -- human conflicts, human emotions, human behavior, and so on; what differs is often mainly the nuances of how things are described or the sequence they are described in. Why should Disney get a copyright on "Snow White" (the movie) just because it attached some specific names and faces to seven dwarfs when the story itself was public domain at that point? What difference is there in that case from giving names to functions and parameters for Java when the general notion of calling into a virtual machine is also effectively in the public domain?

However, I still think you have missed my point because you say I desire copyrighted APIs. I'd rather see copyright rolled back entirely or at least greatly restricted like along the lines Richard Stallman proposes. What I am saying is that as long as one supports copyright as it is now, and as it is being expanded, then you have to accept APIs should be copyrightable. In that sense, if you believe in the value of copyrighting computer software, Linux should *not* have been legally made ignoring that copyright violation sued to be mostly just a civil matter until recently it became criminal, and that the UNIX copyright holders would have had to chosen to purse Linux in court).

I think we probably agree on the moral an economic aspects of FOSS. My point is that we should not be trying to carve out special exemptions for APIs when the whole copyright edifice is maki

There are a few different types of APIs involved with Linux, so it is more than the public API:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L...

Consider:
http://www.kroah.com/log/linux...
"For Linux, we don't have a stable internal api, and for people to wish that we would have one is just foolish. ... Here's an example that shows how this all works. The Linux USB code has been rewritten at least three times. We've done this over time in order to handle things that we didn't originally need to handle, like high speed devices, and just because we learned the problems of our first design, and to fix bugs and security issues. Each time we made changes in our api, we updated all of the kernel drivers that used the apis, so nothing would break. And we deleted the old functions as they were no longer needed, and did things wrong. Because of this, Linux now has the fastest USB bus speeds when you test out all of the different operating systems. We max out the hardware as fast as it can go, and you can do this from simple userspace programs, no fancy kernel driver work is needed."

And:
http://www.helixsoft.nl/blog/?...
"Linux pioneered that model: they call a stable API nonsense. The interface between drivers and the kernel changes all the time. If the Linux developers think of a better, more consistent or more efficient way to interface with the drivers they go ahead and make that change."

Thinking up "a better, more consistent or more efficient way" to interface sounds like creative work to me.

I had a similar disagreement with Alan Kay who argued that programs are mathematical. Given that for our Garden Simulator my wife spent over a year full time translating badly-named spaghetti Fortran code from EPIC to well-structured Delphi code that did essentially *exactly* the same thing, but now was understandable and maintainable, I see *enormous* benefit in naming functions, parameters, and structures well and know how long it may take to do that.
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/...
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/...

If you don't believe well-named APIs have great value, try, say, reverse engineering compacted JavaScript code. It's possible, but it takes an enormous amount of time. From another angle, most of what is written in fiction is about the same old thing -- human conflicts, human emotions, human behavior, and so on; what differs is often mainly the nuances of how things are described or the sequence they are described in. Why should Disney get a copyright on "Snow White" (the movie) just because it attached some specific names and faces to seven dwarfs when the story itself was public domain at that point? What difference is there in that case from giving names to functions and parameters for Java when the general notion of calling into a virtual machine is also effectively in the public domain?

However, I still think you have missed my point because you say I desire copyrighted APIs. I'd rather see copyright rolled back entirely or at least greatly restricted like along the lines Richard Stallman proposes. What I am saying is that as long as one supports copyright as it is now, and as it is being expanded, then you have to accept APIs should be copyrightable. In that sense, if you believe in the value of copyrighting computer software, Linux should *not* have been legally made ignoring that copyright violation sued to be mostly just a civil matter until recently it became criminal, and that the UNIX copyright holders would have had to chosen to purse Linux in court).

I think we probably agree on the moral an economic aspects of FOSS. My point is that we should not be trying to carve out special exemptions for APIs when the whole copyright edifice is maki

The site seems notable for its comprehensiveness. I also though it would be great if Lindsay Books would have put copies of everything online for free (like via Archive.org) before it shut down, since most of what it had sold were reprints of content now in the public domain. I'm assuming the site in the article may have much the same stuff?
http://www.lindsaybks.com/

While a related project by me hasn't really got going strongly yet, the OSCOMAK project was a hope to organize all this sort of info and more to let people design whatever individual or community infrastructure they wanted. From pages linked here put up around 2000:
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/...
"The Oscomak project is an attempt to create a core of communities more in control of their technological destiny and its social implications. No single design for a community or technology will please everyone, or even many people. Nor would a single design be likely to survive. So this project endeavors to gather information and to develop tools and processes that all fit together conceptually like Tinkertoys or Legos. The result will be a library of possibilities that individuals in a community can use to achieve any degree of self-sufficiency and self-replication within any size community, from one person to a billion people. Within every community people will interact with these possibilities by using them and extending them to design a community economy and physical layout that suits their needs and ideas.
As the internet has grown, it has enabled collaborative work which has created many success stories, including Linux, Python, GCC, Squeak and other projects. We want to harness that power and apply it to organizing technological knowledge in concert with many interested individuals.
The main project goal is to develop an on-line library of technology ideas, techniques, and tools, including a range from high-tech processes like plastics to medium-tech like ceramic houses to low-tech like spinning wheels. Also included will be biotechnology processes, like perennial agriculture, companion planting, sheep farming, and eventually cloning and DNA synthesis.
One process to be included is a way to convert the high-tech computerized library to a low-tech paper one as desired. Key to the whole endeavor will be to present everything in a how-to fashion. Also needed is a way to map out and simulate the interrelations of processes; for instance, sheep raising requires veterinarians, antibiotics, feed, fencing, and shears; shears require a blacksmith, metal, and a furnace. This latter feature also would be used to keep track of the product flows into, out of, and within a community's entire economy."

Been plodding along on this idea for a couple decades, but still not much to show... But, still a bit...

Our garden simulator from 1997 was part of this -- to help people learn how to grow their own food in an efficient and sustainable way.
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/...

My hopes for this go back to the 1980s and before, even envisioning something like the world wide web to support it:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/prin...

No doubt many personal failings and distraction have contributed to my limited progress -- especially the distraction of trying to create better software tools for distributed knowledge sharing and programming like the Pointrel system and PataPapa.

None-the-less, there is also an aspect to which the current economic order is not too keen on such work. As is suggested by John Taylor Gatto:
https://web.archive.org/web/20...
"Iâ(TM)ll bring this down to earth. Try to see that an intricately sub

The site seems notable for its comprehensiveness. I also though it would be great if Lindsay Books would have put copies of everything online for free (like via Archive.org) before it shut down, since most of what it had sold were reprints of content now in the public domain. I'm assuming the site in the article may have much the same stuff?
http://www.lindsaybks.com/

While a related project by me hasn't really got going strongly yet, the OSCOMAK project was a hope to organize all this sort of info and more to let people design whatever individual or community infrastructure they wanted. From pages linked here put up around 2000:
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/...
"The Oscomak project is an attempt to create a core of communities more in control of their technological destiny and its social implications. No single design for a community or technology will please everyone, or even many people. Nor would a single design be likely to survive. So this project endeavors to gather information and to develop tools and processes that all fit together conceptually like Tinkertoys or Legos. The result will be a library of possibilities that individuals in a community can use to achieve any degree of self-sufficiency and self-replication within any size community, from one person to a billion people. Within every community people will interact with these possibilities by using them and extending them to design a community economy and physical layout that suits their needs and ideas.
As the internet has grown, it has enabled collaborative work which has created many success stories, including Linux, Python, GCC, Squeak and other projects. We want to harness that power and apply it to organizing technological knowledge in concert with many interested individuals.
The main project goal is to develop an on-line library of technology ideas, techniques, and tools, including a range from high-tech processes like plastics to medium-tech like ceramic houses to low-tech like spinning wheels. Also included will be biotechnology processes, like perennial agriculture, companion planting, sheep farming, and eventually cloning and DNA synthesis.
One process to be included is a way to convert the high-tech computerized library to a low-tech paper one as desired. Key to the whole endeavor will be to present everything in a how-to fashion. Also needed is a way to map out and simulate the interrelations of processes; for instance, sheep raising requires veterinarians, antibiotics, feed, fencing, and shears; shears require a blacksmith, metal, and a furnace. This latter feature also would be used to keep track of the product flows into, out of, and within a community's entire economy."

Been plodding along on this idea for a couple decades, but still not much to show... But, still a bit...

Our garden simulator from 1997 was part of this -- to help people learn how to grow their own food in an efficient and sustainable way.
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/...

My hopes for this go back to the 1980s and before, even envisioning something like the world wide web to support it:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/prin...

No doubt many personal failings and distraction have contributed to my limited progress -- especially the distraction of trying to create better software tools for distributed knowledge sharing and programming like the Pointrel system and PataPapa.

None-the-less, there is also an aspect to which the current economic order is not too keen on such work. As is suggested by John Taylor Gatto:
https://web.archive.org/web/20...
"Iâ(TM)ll bring this down to earth. Try to see that an intricately sub

Seem my other comment here, but in short, pretty much all the same sorts of technologies we need to live in space would make life better on Earth. These include better recycling, power generation, advanced medicine and nutrition, cradle-to-cradle zero emissions manufacturing, greenhouse agriculture, education-on-demand, a library of open source part designs for 3D printing or other manufacturing, better ways of resolving conflicts in small groups or between groups, and so on. So, we don't have to pick one or the other. Sad thing is, we too often seem to pick neither and instead prop up social systems built around "artificial scarcity" and "learned" stupidity.

In general though, I agree with you that we could make the Earth more like a "Star Trek" society. Here is an essay I wrote about that a decade ago:
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/...
"This essay shows how a total of $14000 billion up front and at least another $2085 billion per year can be made available for creative investment in the USA by adopting a post-scarcity worldview. This money can help further fund a virtuous cycle of more creative and more cost saving efforts, as well as better education. It calls for the non-profit sector to help shape a new mythology of wealth and to take the lead in getting the average person as well as decision makers to make the shift in worldview to their own long term benefit. "

I'm nearing the end of reading "Player Piano" which several people on Slashdot have recommended regarding understanding humans and technology -- although I think a basic income rather than a work requirement would have created a different society, and Vonnegut also seems to ignore how much effort can go into raising healthy and happy children or being a good friend, neighbor, or citizen -- focusing instead of "jobs" in a manufacturing sense.

Related on learned stupidity, by John Taylor Gatto: http://www.naturalchild.org/gu...
"Our school crisis is a reflection of this greater social crisis. We seem to have lost our identity. Children and old people are penned up and locked away from the business of the world to a degree without precedent - nobody talks to them anymore and without children and old people mixing in daily life a community has no future and no past, only a continuous present. In fact, the name "community" hardly applies to the way we interact with each other. We live in networks, not communities, and everyone I know is lonely because of that. In some strange way school is a major actor in this tragedy just as it is a major actor in the widening guilt among social classes. Using school as a sorting mechanism we appear to be on the way to creating a caste system, complete with untouchables who wander through subway trains begging and sleep on the streets.
I've noticed a fascinating phenomenon in my twenty-five years of teaching - that schools and schooling are increasingly irrelevant to the great enterprises of the planet. No one believes anymore that scientists are trained in science classes or politicians in civics classes or poets in English classes. The truth is that schools don't really teach anything except how to obey orders. This is a great mystery to me because thousands of humane, caring people work in schools as teachers and aides and administrators but the abstract logic of the institution overwhelms their individual contributions. Although teachers do care and do work very hard, the institution is psychopathic - it has no conscience. It rings a bell and the young man in the middle of writing a poem must close his notebook and move to different cell where he must memorize that man and monkeys derive from a common ancestor.
Our form of compulsory schooling is an invention of the state of Massachusetts around 1850. It was resisted - sometimes with guns - by an estimated eighty per cent of the Massachusetts population, the last

As I discussed here (~25years ago): http://www.pdfernhout.net/prin...
"As outlined in my statement of purpose, my lifetime goal is to design and construct self-replicating habitats. These habitats can be best envisioned as huge walled gardens inhabited by thousands of people. Each garden would have a library which would contain the information needed to construct a new garden from tools and materials found within the garden's walls. The garden walls and construction methods would be of several different types, allowing such gardens to be built on land, underground, in space, or under the ocean. Such gardens would have the capacity to seal themselves to become environmentally and economically self-sufficient in the event of economic collapse or global warfare and the attendant environmental destruction. "

And: http://www.pdfernhout.net/reco...

And here: http://pcast.ideascale.com/a/d...

But many others have discussed similar things, so just another voice in the choir in that sense. If Musk really reflects on these issues (other than being another Mars fanboy) he will see that there are many possible avenues to decentralization and resiliency, of which Mars is just one. As we gain knowledge and experience in creating such systems, then we can disperse farther and farther to deal with bigger and bigger possible disasters (including the ones you point out about gamma ray burst or wandering neutron stars).

More ideas in that direction: http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/...

And by others:
http://www.luf.org/
http://tmp2.wikia.com/wiki/Mai...
http://lifeboat.com/ex/main
http://openluna.org/

Also something I've been involved with, but has since became more broadly "Open Manufacturing" and the maker movement: http://openvirgle.net/

So, generation ships etc. are interesting ideas, and they all fit into a large general picture of possibilities.

Still, for all that, making the Earth work well for most everyone (zero emissions cradle-to-cradle manufacturing, better healthcare and nutrition, a global basic income, better education for all, indoor agriculture, new power sources like dirt cheap solar and hot and cold fusion, and so on) is a good first step towards knowing how to live in space, especially given we are already on what Bucky Fuller called "Spaceship Earth". So, I see no big incompatibility between trying to make the Earth work for everyone and preparing for a future where there are quadrillions of people living in self-replicating space habitats throughout the solar system and ultimately the galaxy and beyond -- perhaps even into other dimensions and realities and simulations? Of course, there are philosophical issues still about all this about meanings in life and so on.

Though only finished and released around 1997: http://www.gardenwithinsight.c...

(Unrelated work and also two years of grad school to learn more about ecological modelling plus excessive ambition caused delays in getting it done...)

And MECC's "Lunar Greenhouse" from 1989 ran on the Apple II:
http://www.worldcat.org/title/...

This emulator did not work for me, but seemingly Lunar Greenhouse is online:
http://www.virtualapple.org/me...
http://www.virtualapple.org/J_...

But there are other text-based games like Hamurabi which goes all the way back to 1968 where you "plant" crops and harvest them. I played a variation of tha first around 1980 or so.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H...

It can be played online:
http://www.hammurabigame.com/h...

I've long wanted to build a general purpose gardening (and maintenance) robot like the ones in "Silent Running". For some reason, there has been economic resistance to supporting general purpose agricultural robots. Cheap illegal labor in that sense harmed my career in robotics in the 1980s when I really, really wanted to make such things. :-(

That's one reason I've just done software, which is cheaper to do on your own than robotics. Or it was, now that robotics is getting so much cheaper for various reasons due to cheap powerful embedded computers and cheaper sensors and actuators and 3D printing and web-based design and manufacturing like via 100K garages and such.
http://www.100kgarages.com/

There were a couple times I spoke with academic roboticists about making general purpose agricultural robotics in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Both were interested in industry-fundable specific purpose robots, like for seeding transfer in greenhouses (Rutgers) or for autonomous wheat harvesting with big machines (CMU). Those were no doubt fairly practical ideas, and I may have been well served in a robotics career to have pursued such practical ideas in cooperation with those professors, but they were not the general purpose system I really wanted to work on like the Silent Running-type drones. Still, they might have been stepping stones to better systems -- but it is easy to be too ambitious and impatient when you are young.

Nowadays though, there seems to be a resurgence of interest in agricultural robotics, and I wonder if crackdowns on illegal agricultural labor may even be connected to it?
"Crackdown on illegal immigrants left crops rotting in Georgia fields, ag chief tells US lawmakers
http://blog.al.com/wire/2011/1...

Also, this is a problematical statement from the point of view of a robotics engineer: "A robust agricultural guest worker program, properly designed, will not displace American workers," Black said in remarks prepared for the hearing. "As my testimony shows, in Georgia, even with current high unemployment rates, it is difficult for farmers to fill their labor needs."

That guest worker program displaces robotics engineers... Otherwise there would be a much greater demand for general purpose agricultural robots.

Instead, I worked on virtual gardening software for growing virtual plants. My wife and I also made a simpler version of the garden simulator just for breeding virtual plants (mostly her work):
https://github.com/pdfernhout/...
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/...

That said, there is little that is better for mental health for many people than

Thanks for the amusingly accurate XKCD link and insightful game comparison! I agree. However, it can be tricky to get a good game balance and have a good "microworld" framework for open-ended exploration. KSP pulls it off, whereas, say, our FOSS garden simulator from around 1997 does not.
http://www.gardenwithinsight.c...

That gardening simulator was written in part as a first step towards a space habitat simulator -- since you need to grow food even in space. Unfortunately, funding it ourselves for years (much of the living expenses for that work funded crazily on credit cards which took many years of doing unrelated work afterwards to repay), we had to triage out many of the open-ended interesting parts of gardening to get the first version done. We emphasized scientific accuracy as far as we could, which probably was a mistake compared to starting with simpler models. My wife and I both had been in a graduate program in ecology an evolution, so we has an academic bias. After the first version, we did not have time and resources to revisit it. We had hopes and sketches back then for activities like canning your own food, "survival" gardening where you had to grow enough calories or starve, interactions with neighbors, a virtual computer in the simulation where you did garden planning and looked up gardening info, and so on. A few vestiges of those remain, like the simulation being able to provide a calorie count of what you harvest. The open ended parts like designing your own tools, soil amendments, and plants were not that engaging in how they were implemented. By contrast, the "Harvest Moon" video game series emphasized fun parts of gardening for most people (like interactions with neighbors), although they lacked the science. It can be hard to bring that all together.

Here was a related (unfunded) NSF pre-proposal from 1997 for a second version of the garden simulator (never made) emphasizing creating an open-ended FOSS modeling environment for gardening-related models, but even that probably would not have been that much fun for most people even if it might have transformed the field of agricultural simulation:
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/...
"The usual outcome of an effort such as ours is a commercially distributed software product with proprietary source code. However, research continues on modeling of soil processes and plant growth, and this product will soon fall out of step. A proprietary program may be a bridge, but no one can walk across it. By making the model source code available, we will bring scientists out from their side of the bridge to interact with the models, while at the other end of the bridge the general public will step out by changing the models themselves."

But that was before I understood "the Big Crunch" like Dr. David Goodstein talks about and how hard it was to get grant money of any sort:
http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg...
"The period 1950-1970 was a true golden age for American science. Young Ph.D's could choose among excellent jobs, and anyone with a decent scientific idea could be sure of getting funds to pursue it. The impressive successes of scientific projects during the Second World War had paved the way for the federal government to assume responsibility for the support of basic research. ... By now, in the 1990's, the situation has changed dramatically. With the Cold War over, National Security is rapidly losing its appeal as a means of generating support for scientific research. There are those who argue that research is essential for our economic future, but the managers of the economy know better. The great corporations have decided that central research laboratories were not such a good idea after all. Many of the national laboratories have lost their missions and have not found new ones. The economy has gradually transformed from manufacturing to service,

A leader might accidentally trip and fall on the button in your scenario too. Einstein said, learning how to release atomic power changed everything except our thinking. That issue is still playing out, and motivates much of my efforts (whether towards abundance for all, better tools for civic sensemaking and education, or work towards self-replicating habitats for Earth and space). Who in the tech profession has not seen a variety of complex systems fail in unexpected ways over the years? So, speaking purely probabilistically, chances are, we will see these weapons go off sooner or later due to accident or error. They might go off because of a technical accident ("99 Red Balloons" wrongly interpreted as an attack, a massive solar flare causing a launch, bad capacitors causing a launch, etc.). Or they might be used because of a psychological or political accident (like the one your insightful story is about). As others have also pointed out, "MAD" assumes rational actors trying to act in self-preservation; if you put lunatics in charge of the button then it might get pressed for any number of crazy reasons same as many people regularly do other self-destructive things.

21st century technologies of abundance (nuclear, biological, chemical, nanotech, robotic, AI, communications, bureaucracy) create more "buttons" in more places in the hands of more people. That makes it more and more likely a button somewhere will get pressed. Worse, many (probably most) the people using these 21st technologies are still locked in a 20th century (and earlier) mindset of worrying about material scarcity. So, they ironically are willing to use nuclear energy (as bombs) to fight over oil fields, when nuclear energy could instead produce all the energy we might otherwise get from oil (not that I'm much of a conventional nuclear fan compared to renewables, energy efficiency, fusion, or LENR).

While we need to do what we can to reduce the chance that any of the buttons get pressed including by promoting a philosophy of mutual security, we should also design with the expectation they will eventually get pressed, and create an infrastructure that is resilient and distributed enough to muddle through anyway as a form on intrinsic security. The internet was supposedly designed to survive nuclear war. We need to apply some of the same thinking to agriculture, power, medicine, education, transportation, and so on. However, this strategy for intrinsic and mutual security is completely at odds with maximizing short-term economic profits by "just in time" delivery of good produced or routed through centralized hubs controlled by a few monopolistic actors.

My OSCOMAK project (and precursors) was a hope in that direction (not that I've succeeded much with it directly).
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/...
http://www.pdfernhout.net/prin...
"Why do I want to build these habitats? Most people would agree there is at least a one percent chance the human race will wipe itself out within the next century through a nuclear or biological war. The issue isn't even necessarily about our politicians making mistakes. The fallibility of the Soviet missile command computer technicians is what worries me most. Like anyone else familiar with computers, I know how easy it is to make a mistake with one. Beyond accidental warfare, expanding populations and industrial pollution threaten our lives just as much. I feel that even if there is only a one percent chance of ecological disaster over the next century, I want to do my best to ensure human survival in that case.
Most people do not think about these issues, or if they do, rapidly dismiss the problems as too large and impossible to do anything significant about. I feel I have an alternative to apathy or despair. Some habitats in space or underwater would probably survive a nuclear war. Unlike bomb shelters, they would provide an intact technological

But, would be nice to develop it before-hand; from: http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/...
---
Self-replicating technical artifacts such as dogs, corn, and trees have been in use by humanity for thousands of years. While humans cannot lay credit to the original creation of such systems, they can claim the adaptation and selective breeding of these for defense, food, and building materials.

In the past few millennia, many people have become dependent on technology that is not self-replicating. Primarily this technology involves fairly pure forms of metals, plastics, and crystals. These technologies have expanded the earth's human carrying capacity in the short term, but are not sustainable in the long term. Such technologies lack the closed resource cycles, independent operation, redundancy, and resiliency found in natural systems. A symptom of the use of such non-sustainable systems is the fear that a single problem (like Y2K) could cause a major disruption of life-support infrastructure in the developed world.

For example, both Brittle Power (Amory and Hunter Lovins) and Energy, Vulnerability, and War (Wilson Clark and Jake Page), make clear how vulnerable our energy infrastructure is. As Brittle Power (pg.391-392) mentions, this vulnerability also holds for food and manufacturing production:

"The production and distribution of food are currently so centralized, with small buffer stocks and supply lines averaging thirteen hundred miles long, that bad weather or a truckers' strike can put many retail stores on short rations in a matter of days. This vulnerability is especially pronounced in the Northeast, which imports over eighty percent of its food. In a disaster, the lack of regional self sufficiency both in food production and food storage would cause havoc, but no one is planning for such possibilities."

And in reference to energy production:

"The Joint Committee on Defense Production notes that American industry is tailor made for easy disruption. Its qualities include large unit scale, concentration of key facilities, reliance on advanced materials inputs and on specialized electronics and automation, highly energy- and capital- intensive plants, and small inventories. The Committee found that correcting these defects, even incrementally and over many decades, could be very costly. But the cost of not doing so could be even higher -- a rapid regression of tens, or even hundreds of years in the American economy, should it be gravely disrupted."

In a long-term space mission or a space settlement, a self-sustaining economy must be created and supported. Therefore, addressing the problem of technological fragility on earth is an essential step in the development of the development of human settlement in space.
The heart of any community is its library, which stores a wide variety of technological processes, only some of which are used at any one time in any specific environment. If an independent community is like a cell, its library is like its DNA. A library has many functions: the education of new community members; the support of important activities such as farming and material extraction; historical recording of events; support for planning and design. And the library grows and evolves with the community.

The earth's library of technological knowledge is fragmented and obscure, and some important knowledge has been lost already. How can we create a library strong enough to foster the growth of new communities in space? How can we today use what we know to improve human life?
---
The development of the Oscomak infrastructure will be an ambitious undertaking, requiring the involvement of tens of thousands of knowledgeable individuals over a period of years. There is no way one single entity can fund this work. However, there is a way to allow such individuals to cooperate -- as an "open source" community, sharing knowledge and building a distributed repository over the internet.

The revolutionary aspec

Plus furniture for such "aliens" to sit on: http://science.slashdot.org/st...

Even without DNA manipulation or 3D printing, AI and robotics are rapidly taking us "where no one has gone before". Although, that perhaps ignores slave holding elites throughout the ages, although slaves still had to be managed and could easily revolt?

In many ways, I consider Amazon to be a lot like a 3D printer -- just a very slow one that takes a couple days to print almost anything. Except I don't have that many replication ration units compared to a post-scarcity society, so I still have to make hard choices, plus I feel bad that many people in society can't access the Amazon replicators, which reduces my enjoyment plus makes society a riskier place to be. And I can't easily unprint stuff when I am done with it or want to store it.

By me from a decade ago on funding to create a Star Trek society: http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/...

Practical aspects: http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/...

Political ones: http://www.pdfernhout.net/reco...

Education ones: http://www.pdfernhout.net/post...

Economic ones: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
http://www.pdfernhout.net/medi...

Others: http://www.dougengelbart.org/c...

With enough energy (such as from LENR someday perhaps, or hot fusion, massive solar, or thorium otherwise), almost everything become easy to recycle or clean up, like via huge mass spectrometers used to separate different atoms.
http://www.freeenergytimes.com...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...

Others who make related points about abundance as well as its challenges to conventional economics:
http://worldtransformed.com/
http://marshallbrain.com/manna...
http://www.thelightsinthetunne...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T...
etc.

Plus furniture for such "aliens" to sit on: http://science.slashdot.org/st...

Even without DNA manipulation or 3D printing, AI and robotics are rapidly taking us "where no one has gone before". Although, that perhaps ignores slave holding elites throughout the ages, although slaves still had to be managed and could easily revolt?

In many ways, I consider Amazon to be a lot like a 3D printer -- just a very slow one that takes a couple days to print almost anything. Except I don't have that many replication ration units compared to a post-scarcity society, so I still have to make hard choices, plus I feel bad that many people in society can't access the Amazon replicators, which reduces my enjoyment plus makes society a riskier place to be. And I can't easily unprint stuff when I am done with it or want to store it.

By me from a decade ago on funding to create a Star Trek society: http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/...

Practical aspects: http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/...

Political ones: http://www.pdfernhout.net/reco...

Education ones: http://www.pdfernhout.net/post...

Economic ones: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
http://www.pdfernhout.net/medi...

Others: http://www.dougengelbart.org/c...

With enough energy (such as from LENR someday perhaps, or hot fusion, massive solar, or thorium otherwise), almost everything become easy to recycle or clean up, like via huge mass spectrometers used to separate different atoms.
http://www.freeenergytimes.com...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...

Others who make related points about abundance as well as its challenges to conventional economics:
http://worldtransformed.com/
http://marshallbrain.com/manna...
http://www.thelightsinthetunne...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T...
etc.

"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Only_the_Super-Rich_Can_Save_Us!"
http://onlythesuperrich.org/
"Just as Atlas Shrugged portrayed self-interested successful capitalists working to create a "Utopia of Greed" that is free from government, Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us! portrays an altruistic group of super-rich individuals working to "re-make government" and where "the rebellious rich take on the reigning rich."[4] The novel's protagonist is inspired by Warren Buffett. On August 14, 2011, Warren Buffett wrote an influential op-ed entitled, "Stop Coddling the Super-rich",[5] which argues that the super-rich should bear more responsibility and pay their "fair share" of taxes."

Daniel Quinn wrote about such cycles of collapse: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B...

Other ideas: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...

Jane Jacobs suggested alternatives: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D...

On self-renewal: http://books.google.com/books/...

Zinn on "The Coming Revolt of the Guards": http://www.historyisaweapon.co...

To do before collapse (1999 proposal to NASA): http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/...

See James P. Hogan's 1982 sci-fi novel Voyage from Yesteryear. Or any of my own numerous postings.

Some related ideas by me on moving towards post-scarcity:
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/...
http://www.pdfernhout.net/reco...
http://www.pdfernhout.net/post...
http://www.artificialscarcity....

Not enough time right now to respond to all the great things people are discussing here. Glad to see so many posts on this topic. And the original topic by an investor.

... was to have a historical aspect (my proposal from around 1999): http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/...
"The OSCOMAK project will foster a community in which many interested individuals will contribute to the creation of a distributed global repository of manufacturing knowledge about past, present and future processes, materials, and products."

The idea goes back into the 1980s:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/prin...

Can't say I've gotten very far with it in the past quarter century (so many unrelated distractions just to make a living), but it is good to at least see all the scattered piecemeal efforts around the web with so much great content. The general adhoc Maker movement has the momentum now, and might someday converge on something like this. In any case, it would be good to have standards for encoding this knowledge so we could then apply tools to look at all the complex web of interdependencies. NIST has done a bit in that direction.

Good points, along the lines of books like "Brave New World" and "Amusing Ourselves to Death". Although it seems lots of systems link together to support power, so there is probably not just one, even if one may be stronger at one time.

The movie "Elysium" features security robots, for example. I envisioned something related here with robots enforcing the "rules":
"The Richest Man in the World: A parable about structural unemployment and a basic income"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p14bAe6AzhA

Marshall Brain talks about robots enforcing things in "Manna":
http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

But right now, the laws the human police (and legal bureaucracies) enforce are created through political means:
http://www2.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica
"Q: So, who does rule America?
A: The owners and managers of large income-producing properties; i.e., the owners of corporations, banks, other financial institutions, and agri-businesses. But they have plenty of help from the managers and experts they hire. ...
Q: Then how do they rule?
A: That's a complicated story, but the short answer is through lobbying, open and direct involvement in general policy planning on the big issues, participation (in large part through campaign donations) in political campaigns and elections, and through appointments to key decision-making positions in government."

That said, perhaps the world will always be run by the "1%" who are paying attention in any community? Even those who showed up at "Occupy Wall Street" were, in a sense, part of a "1%"?

OWS's "We are the 99%" was actually a divisive slogan. A focus on increasing egalitarianism might have been better:
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/

Maybe the main issue is whether those who are paying attention have an egalitarian mindset to some degree, at least as far as distributing most of what nature and industry produces? If you look at Western Europe, there is a somewhat different sense of political and moral accountability among leadership. Granted, that is driven by a more active and aware populace building upon ideas from the USA's past:
http://www.salon.com/books/feature/2010/08/25/german_usa_working_life_ext2010
" How did Germany become such a great place to work in the first place? ... The Allies did it. This whole European model came, to some extent, from the New Deal. Our real history and tradition is what we created in Europe. Occupying Germany after WWII, the 1945 European constitutions, the UN Charter of Human Rights all came from Eleanor Roosevelt and the New Dealers. All of it got worked into the constitutions of Europe and helped shape their social democracies. It came from us. The papal encyclicals on labor, it came from the Americans."

Thus:
"How Germany Builds Twice as Many Cars as the U.S. While Paying Its Workers Twice as Much"
http://www.forbes.com/sites/frederickallen/2011/12/21/germany-builds-twice-as-many-cars-as-the-u-s-while-paying-its-auto-workers-twice-as-much/
"In 2010, Germany produced more than 5.5 million automobiles; the U.S produced 2.7 million. At the same time, the average auto worker in Germany made $67.14 per hour in salary in benefits; the average one in the U.S. made $33.77 per hour. Yet Germanyâ(TM)s big three car companies --- BMW, Daimler (Mercedes-Benz), and Volkswagen -- are very profitable."

That comes down somewhat to culture and mythology and the stories we (including the "1%") tell ourselves about who we are and who we want to be (and why).

... Or also, space is not so nasty if you have the technology to make whatever you want from local materials (including a towel). :-)

Mostly still just a dream:
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/

Great points. Because we can always make solar panels and windmills, I'm not too worried about space expansion being impossible from running out of fossil fuels from Peak Oil or whatever. And I agree that with enough energy, pretty much all resource issues become easy to solve.

On making it into space, see my comments here on self-replicating space habitats:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=4080869&cid=44543237

On energy in general, as Amory Lovins an others have said, if fossil fuels and older nuclear had to pay their true costs up front (including health costs, environmental damage, centralization risks), renewables (like solar thermal) would have been cheaper since the 1970s. It's only because of tax preferences and unpaid externalities (e.g. politics) that fossil fuels have remained in widespread use. What is happening now is that wind and solar are becoming even cheaper than subsidized polluting risky fossil fuels etc..

In a capitalist society, prisons and war can be profitable, so we get lobbying for laws and politics such that they increase. Of course, in other societies, prisons and war can be sources of political power, so that growth is not unique to capitalism. In the theory of social decline, those cancers will grow until the society collapses because it can't afford them. And then the whole thing would start over, The difference this time is we have nukes and bioengineered plagues and soon autonomous killer robots, so its not clear humans will survive if our global society collapses in some likely ways. But, perhaps some isolated habitats might survive (ocean, subterranean, antarctic, space).
http://www.pdfernhout.net/princeton-graduate-school-plans.html
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/

So, in that one sense, perhaps people like William Catton are right that the Earth has surpassed its "carrying capacity" -- but only in the narrow sense of carrying capacity including the ability to absorb humanities follies from greed and war. Otherwise we could probably support trillions of people on Earth with advanced technologies using lots of nuclear energy as you outline. A related story:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World_Inside

Not that we'd probably want to do that compared to living in space and making the Earth into a nature park and religious shrine?

See also my other comments on this article. And also, from the 1980s, my own (dashed) hopes: http://www.pdfernhout.net/princeton-graduate-school-plans.html

The solar power space satellites idea doesn't make economic sense anymore with the falling prices of solar panels, even if it might have in the 1970s.

Space habitats are still doable though via crowd-sourcing a design that could be launched like a seed factory to the Moon or asteroids. Steps by me in that general area:
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/SSI_Fernhout2001_web.html
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/

And other people have related ideas like TMP2 and OpenLuna.

See also my other comments on this article. And also, from the 1980s, my own (dashed) hopes: http://www.pdfernhout.net/princeton-graduate-school-plans.html

The solar power space satellites idea doesn't make economic sense anymore with the falling prices of solar panels, even if it might have in the 1970s.

Space habitats are still doable though via crowd-sourcing a design that could be launched like a seed factory to the Moon or asteroids. Steps by me in that general area:
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/SSI_Fernhout2001_web.html
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/

And other people have related ideas like TMP2 and OpenLuna.

Back when NASA was more ambitious and had better political support: http://www.islandone.org/MMSG/aasm/
"What follows is a portion of the final report of
a NASA summer study, conducted in 1980 by request of newly-elected President Jimmy Carter at a cost of 11.7 million dollars. The result of the study was a realistic proposal for a self-replicating automated lunar factory system, capable of exponentially increasing productive capacity and, in the long run, exploration of the entire galaxy within a reasonable timeframe. Unfortunately, the proposal was quietly declined with barely a ripple in the press.
    What was once concievable with 1980's technology is now even more practical today. Even if you're just skimming through this document, the potential of this proposed system is undeniable. Please enjoy."

As I said elsewhere:
http://slashdot.org/topic/cloud/the-science-behind-elysium/
"The cheapest way forward may be to create an open source plan for an automated seed that could be sent to an asteroid where it would begin to grow into a space habitat. Then the habitat could duplicate itself by making more seeds. The habitats could create transport spacecraft to land on Earth and solar space satellites to power them on the ground for launching back into space with people on board. So, all it takes is crowd-sourcing and the cost of the first seed and the first launch. Well, of course the first might fail, but by the tenth try it might work. So, it might be doable for only a few billion dollars in real money for materials and the first launches. Testing could be mostly done via simulation."

Related projects I've participated in:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/princeton-graduate-school-plans.html
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/
http://openvirgle.net/

It may be easier to figure out how humans can live in zero-G by bio-engineering though, compared to spinning big heavy things.
http://tmp2.wikia.com/wiki/Asgard

I also suggest living in liquid with probably "liquid breathing" as an option to prevent muscle wasting and bone loss (since whales do OK by resistance from water):
http://www.oscomak.net/wiki/Liquid_breathing_to_resist_bone_loss

My: "Self-Replicating Space Habitat graduate school purpose and plans from 1988" http://www.pdfernhout.net/princeton-graduate-school-plans.html

http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/SSI_Fernhout2001_web.html

http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/

Some of my inspirations:
http://www.islandone.org/MMSG/aasm/
http://www.jamesphogan.com/books/book.php?titleID=28
http://www.jamesphogan.com/books/book.php?titleID=29
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silent_Running

The cheapest way forward may be to create an open source plan for an automated seed that could be sent to an asteroid where it would begin to grow into a space habitat. Then the habitat could duplicate itself by making more seeds. The habitats could create space craft to land on earth and solar space satellites to launch them back into space with people on-board. So, all it takes is crow-sourcing and the cost of the first seed and the first launch. Well, of course the first might fail, but by the tenth try it might work. So, it might be doable for only a few billion dollars in real money for materials and the first launches. Testing could be mostly done via simulation.

My: "Self-Replicating Space Habitat graduate school purpose and plans from 1988" http://www.pdfernhout.net/princeton-graduate-school-plans.html

http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/SSI_Fernhout2001_web.html

http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/

Some of my inspirations:
http://www.islandone.org/MMSG/aasm/
http://www.jamesphogan.com/books/book.php?titleID=28
http://www.jamesphogan.com/books/book.php?titleID=29
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silent_Running

The cheapest way forward may be to create an open source plan for an automated seed that could be sent to an asteroid where it would begin to grow into a space habitat. Then the habitat could duplicate itself by making more seeds. The habitats could create space craft to land on earth and solar space satellites to launch them back into space with people on-board. So, all it takes is crow-sourcing and the cost of the first seed and the first launch. Well, of course the first might fail, but by the tenth try it might work. So, it might be doable for only a few billion dollars in real money for materials and the first launches. Testing could be mostly done via simulation.

Around 1997-1998 the bottom seemed to fall out of the educational software market in general, including with prices falling for boxed software and expectations rising for artwork and embedded video. That was unfortunate for me and my wife as we were just finishing a first version of an educational garden simulator. I first had the initial idea about ten years earlier while a program administrator for the NOFA-NJ organic farm certification program; too bad it took so long to bring it to fruition (including going to graduate school in biology). Guess time-to-market is really important. :-)

Mergers were one issue, I agree, including trying to get MECC interested in distributing our software back then. Perhaps the rise of the web was another. Store shelves were full of fighting and competitive games to get the dollars of kids. A bigger issue was was maybe that parents who bought educational software looked for checklists of how the software would help their child get better grades in school at specific school tasks -- which generally has a tangential-at-best relationship to true education (see John Taylor Gatto, John Holt, Alife Kohn, etc.).

Still, there is a lot of great educational software out there now, between apps, the web, PCs, and so on. Examples (including Kerbal Space Program and Minecraft):
"8 Videogames to Get Your Kid Into Engineering"
http://www.wired.com/gamelife/2012/12/videogames-engineering-kids/?pid=3191&viewall=true

And that includes tools anyone can use in an interesting way, whether 3D design tools or even just word processors for writing up a story.

Still, from what you say, maybe we are lucky that the rights to our garden simulator software never got entwined with MECC, because then we could not have offered it for free with source for about fifteen years as we have.
http://www.gardenwithinsight.com/
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/

I worked unrelated jobs during writing that software. And it took years by my wife and me of working for others at unrelated jobs like at IBM Research to pay back what we had borrowed to finish it. It was such a loss of our being tooled up to further improve the software (and a couple related programs built on the same base, PlantStudio and StoryHarp software). Another couple years of being in the groove full-time focusing on that after the software was done, responding to feedback from users, and it all might have turned into something really spectacular. We had triaged out broader cooperative gaming aspects from the first version of Garden Simulator (like the Harvest Moon series succeeded at later), but hoped to add it back in future versions. Instead later I saw the Zynga people become worth billions with FarmVille. Well, I can hope in some indirect way we contributed to current educational and free software successes by example.

Anyway, I hope for a "basic income" for all someday so all people who want to make creative endeavors like free educational software have the time to do so, individually or collectively.

I did a little bit of wire-wrapping myself to build an I/O system for Commodore equipment, but not much, and wire wrapping was going out of style even then. Good points about knowledge of physics etc. as a layer below. I do not know off-hand how to make a transistor chemically in practical terms, for example.

As for difficulty of lifework, it's a "standing on the shoulders of giants thing". One success (like with Doug) can enable the next, like the systems Doug Engelbart and Alan Kay and others pioneered in turn support my own ambitions. Compared to about thirty years ago when I started this quixotic scheme, self-replicating space habitats almost seem like an easy reach at this point (even if still decade or two away from a seed launch). Still a lot of work, but I can see how it could possibly happen by a global networked effort, as described here:
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/SSI_Fernhout2001_web.html
"We believe that thousands of individuals (such as the people at this conference) are ready and willing to make compromises in their own lives to nurture the space settlement dream at the grassroots level - but in a more direct way than has been attempted thus far. In particular, individuals could collaborate on the iterative development of detailed space habitat designs and simulations using nothing more than the computers they already have at home for playing games. While excellent progress has been made on the general engineering design of space habitats (in terms of basic physics and proof-of-concept projects), many of the details remain to be worked out. There have been individual attempts in some of these areas (e.g., the SSI Matrix effort), but a persistent collaborative community has not yet coalesced around constructing a comprehensive and non-proprietary library of such details."

More floundering efforts towards that:
http://www.openvirgle.net/

A better success by others?
http://tmp2.wikia.com/wiki/Main_Page
http://openluna.org/
http://mars-sim.sourceforge.net/

Starting around age 63, my advisor at Princeton, George A. Miller, started plugging away at the (effectively) open source WordNet project and accomplished a lot in 20 years. WordNet underlies much of Google's success. My indirect hand in that:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/openvirgle/PdK35mSNoSU/3zLpZuljHiMJ

But likewise, I can credit his patient systematic work and decision to open source his effort as setting a good example for me.

And, at some point a system can begin to reflect on itself. I agree how little we know individually about how to make stuff in a complex technological environment (compared to day, a family farm, with self-replicating seeds). Thus my suggestion of something like "OSCOMAK" using computer networks to systematize such knowledge on how to make stuff.
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/
"The OSCOMAK project will foster a community in which many interested individuals will contribute to the creation of a distributed global repository of manufacturing knowledge about past, present and future processes, materials, and products. ... The Oscomak project is an attempt to create a core of communities more in control of their technological destiny and its social implications. No single design for a community or technology will please everyone, or even many people. Nor would a single design be likely to survive. So this project endeavors to gather information and to develop tools and processes that all fit together conceptually like Tinkertoys or Legos. The result will be a library of possibilities that individuals in a community can use to achieve any

I did a little bit of wire-wrapping myself to build an I/O system for Commodore equipment, but not much, and wire wrapping was going out of style even then. Good points about knowledge of physics etc. as a layer below. I do not know off-hand how to make a transistor chemically in practical terms, for example.

As for difficulty of lifework, it's a "standing on the shoulders of giants thing". One success (like with Doug) can enable the next, like the systems Doug Engelbart and Alan Kay and others pioneered in turn support my own ambitions. Compared to about thirty years ago when I started this quixotic scheme, self-replicating space habitats almost seem like an easy reach at this point (even if still decade or two away from a seed launch). Still a lot of work, but I can see how it could possibly happen by a global networked effort, as described here:
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/SSI_Fernhout2001_web.html
"We believe that thousands of individuals (such as the people at this conference) are ready and willing to make compromises in their own lives to nurture the space settlement dream at the grassroots level - but in a more direct way than has been attempted thus far. In particular, individuals could collaborate on the iterative development of detailed space habitat designs and simulations using nothing more than the computers they already have at home for playing games. While excellent progress has been made on the general engineering design of space habitats (in terms of basic physics and proof-of-concept projects), many of the details remain to be worked out. There have been individual attempts in some of these areas (e.g., the SSI Matrix effort), but a persistent collaborative community has not yet coalesced around constructing a comprehensive and non-proprietary library of such details."

More floundering efforts towards that:
http://www.openvirgle.net/

A better success by others?
http://tmp2.wikia.com/wiki/Main_Page
http://openluna.org/
http://mars-sim.sourceforge.net/

Starting around age 63, my advisor at Princeton, George A. Miller, started plugging away at the (effectively) open source WordNet project and accomplished a lot in 20 years. WordNet underlies much of Google's success. My indirect hand in that:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/openvirgle/PdK35mSNoSU/3zLpZuljHiMJ

But likewise, I can credit his patient systematic work and decision to open source his effort as setting a good example for me.

And, at some point a system can begin to reflect on itself. I agree how little we know individually about how to make stuff in a complex technological environment (compared to day, a family farm, with self-replicating seeds). Thus my suggestion of something like "OSCOMAK" using computer networks to systematize such knowledge on how to make stuff.
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/
"The OSCOMAK project will foster a community in which many interested individuals will contribute to the creation of a distributed global repository of manufacturing knowledge about past, present and future processes, materials, and products. ... The Oscomak project is an attempt to create a core of communities more in control of their technological destiny and its social implications. No single design for a community or technology will please everyone, or even many people. Nor would a single design be likely to survive. So this project endeavors to gather information and to develop tools and processes that all fit together conceptually like Tinkertoys or Legos. The result will be a library of possibilities that individuals in a community can use to achieve any

Thanks. I first read "The Machine Stops" about 30 years ago, seeing it by chance in a first(?) edition book at SUNY Stony Brook's rare books viewing room. I was so surprised to find a sci-fi story like that in such an old book!

I'm reminded of it when I use internet video conferencing, as one minor point in the book is that the videos were distorted and degraded.

If you like old sci-fi-ish stuff, JD Bernal's book here is great from the 1920s:
http://vserver1.cscs.lsa.umich.edu/~crshalizi/Bernal/
"All these developments would lead to a world incomparably more efficient and richer than the present, capable of supporting a much larger population, secure from want and having ample leisure, but still a world limited in space to the surface of the globe and in time to the caprices of geological epochs. Already ambition is stirring in men to conquer space as they conquered the air, and this ambition - at first fantastic - as time goes on become more and more reinforced by necessity. Ultimately it would seem impossible that it should not be solved. ... Imagine a spherical shell ten miles or so in diameter, made of the lightest materials and mostly hollow; for this purpose the new molecular materials would be admirably suited. Owing to the absence of gravitation its construction would not be an engineering feat of any magnitude. The source of the material out of which this would be made would only be in small part drawn from the earth; for the great bulk of the structure would be made out of the substance of one or more smaller asteroids, rings of Saturn or other planetary detritus. ...
Yet the globe would be by no means isolated. It would be in continuous communication by wireless with other globes and with the earth, and this communication would include the transmission of every sort of sense message which we have at present acquired as well as those which we may require in the future. Interplanetary vessels would insure the transport of men and materials, and see to it that the colonies were not isolated units.
However, the essential positive activity of the globe or colony would be in the development, growth and reproduction of the globe. A globe which was merely a satisfactory way of continuing life indefinitely would barely be more than a reproduction of terrestrial conditions in a more restricted sphere."

I may not have made much progress towards that, but that was essentially my life's work, inspired by JP Hogan's writings and others, before I read that book years later -- to find it envisioned decades earlier.
http://www.pdfernhout.net/princeton-graduate-school-plans.html

But I got bogged down in trying to make better information management, simulation, and sensemaking tool, both because it was a step towards that and because that is cheaper for one person to focus on. An example is our garden simulator, because people will need to know how to grow food in space as well as on earth.
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/summary_gwi.html

Learning to support human life with better sustainable recyclable manufacturing and agriculture on Earth also supports being able to live in space.

Bicycles truly are a very efficient means for transport for certain types of infrastructure.

I guess I can see parallels to Cuba a bit in that sense of "The Machine Stops" as the oil ran out. But Cuba apparently really rebounded and reorganized as described in that link. Decades ago I mused briefly of getting some place like Cuba or Russia interested in ideas that were the precursor to OSCOMAK, given interest in the USA seemed weak, as an effort to create networks of self-replicating high-tech villages, but while it may seem easy to imagine making progress with the support of a dictator, it certainly is a perilous situatio

See Marshall Brain's Manna for an example about "free":
http://marshallbrain.com/manna5.htm
----
"It works like this. Let's say that you own a large piece of land. Say something the size of your state of California. This land contains natural resources. There is the sand on the beaches, from which you can make glass and silicon chips. There are iron, gold and aluminum ores in the soil, which you can mine, refine and form into any shape. There are oil and coal deposits under the ground. There is carbon, nitrogen, hydrogen and oxygen in the air and in the water. If you were to own California, all of these resources are 'free.' That is, since you own them, you don't have to pay anyone for them and they are there for the taking."
    "If you have a source of energy and if you also own smart robots, the robots can turn these resources into anything you want for free. Robots can grow free food for you in the soil. Robots can manufacture things like steel, glass, fiberglass insulation and so on to create free buildings. Robots can weave fabric from cotton or synthetics and make free clothing. In the case of this catalog you are holding, nanoscale robots chain together glucose molecules to form laminar carbohydrates. As long as you have smart robots, along with energy and free resources, everything is free."
    Linda chimed in, "This was Eric's core idea -- everything can be free in a robotic world. Then he took it one step further. He said that everything should be free. Furthermore, he believed that every human being should get an equal share of all of these free products that the robots are producing. He took the American phrase 'all men are created equal' quite literally."
-----

Attempts I've made (not very successfully) to help bring something like that about include:
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/

A "basic income" (social security for all from birth) would be a way to do something in the "Manna" direction right away in the USA, where say, half the GDP would be distributed evenly among residents and half would be earned by those who chose to work.

By me: http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/
----
The Oscomak project is an attempt to create a core of communities more in control of their technological destiny and its social implications. No single design for a community or technology will please everyone, or even many people. Nor would a single design be likely to survive. So this project endeavors to gather information and to develop tools and processes that all fit together conceptually like Tinkertoys or Legos. The result will be a library of possibilities that individuals in a community can use to achieve any degree of self-sufficiency and self-replication within any size community, from one person to a billion people. Within every community people will interact with these possibilities by using them and extending them to design a community economy and physical layout that suits their needs and ideas.

As the internet has grown, it has enabled collaborative work which has created many success stories, including Linux, Python, GCC, Squeak and other projects. We want to harness that power and apply it to organizing technological knowledge in concert with many interested individuals.

The main project goal is to develop an on-line library of technology ideas, techniques, and tools, including a range from high-tech processes like plastics to medium-tech like ceramic houses to low-tech like spinning wheels. Also included will be biotechnology processes, like perennial agriculture, companion planting, sheep farming, and eventually cloning and DNA synthesis.

One process to be included is a way to convert the high-tech computerized library to a low-tech paper one as desired. Key to the whole endeavor will be to present everything in a how-to fashion. Also needed is a way to map out and simulate the interrelations of processes; for instance, sheep raising requires veterinarians, antibiotics, feed, fencing, and shears; shears require a blacksmith, metal, and a furnace. This latter feature also would be used to keep track of the product flows into, out of, and within a community's entire economy.
----

Can't say it has got very far in the past fourteen years or longer (including early incarnations like "STELLA") though. But at least the Maker movement is heading in that direction, even without the comprehensive organization or standards.

http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html
"Likewise, even United States three-letter agencies like the NSA and the CIA, as well as their foreign counterparts, are becoming ironic institutions in many ways. Despite probably having more computing power per square foot than any other place in the world, they seem not to have thought much about the implications of all that computer power and organized information to transform the world into a place of abundance for all. Cheap computing makes possible just about cheap everything else, as does the ability to make better designs through shared computing. ...
There is a fundamental mismatch between 21st century reality and 20th century security thinking. Those "security" agencies are using those tools of abundance, cooperation, and sharing mainly from a mindset of scarcity, competition, and secrecy. Given the power of 21st century technology as an amplifier (including as weapons of mass destruction), a scarcity-based approach to using such technology ultimately is just making us all insecure. Such powerful technologies of abundance, designed, organized, and used from a mindset of scarcity could well ironically doom us all whether through military robots, nukes, plagues, propaganda, or whatever else... Or alternatively, as Bucky Fuller and others have suggested, we could use such technologies to build a world that is abundant and secure for all."

Going forward, there are many other implications of trends from "better, faster, cheaper". We should think about the positive trends and try to help amplify them. Related suggestions by me in areas of collective intelligence for mutual intrinsic security, space settlement, and health sensemaking:
http://www.phibetaiota.net/2011/09/paul-fernhout-open-letter-to-the-intelligence-advanced-programs-research-agency-iarpa/
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/SSI_Fernhout2001_web.html
https://www.changemakers.com/morehealth/entries/health-sensemaking

Or, read "The Skills of Xanadu" for ideas from the 1950s by Theodore Sturgeon which helped inspire Ted Nelson and hypertext and so the world wide web:
http://books.google.com/books?id=wpuJQrxHZXAC&pg=PA51&lpg=PP1#v=onepage&q&f=false

Or look to groups like the Maker community or sustainable technology community inventing new ways of local subsistence.

Something I wrote thirteen years ago to Doug Engelbart's Unrev-II mailing list, and we are still more-or-less following predicted exponential trends:
"[unrev-II] Singularity in twenty to forty years?"
http://www.dougengelbart.org/colloquium/forum/discussion/0126.html
"Below are six "explosive" technology trends that all appear to culminate in around twenty years. Even if some of them don't pan out, the others will revolutionize our world (for good or bad). ...
You may argue the dates -- ten years for some, forty for others. You may point out Y2K didn't melt things down, that AI researchers predicted AIs by now, that fusion power was supposed to be here by now, etc. And you would be right to be skeptical. My point is that these are trends in many different areas -- any one of which would make this world radically different. Together, they spell awesome change -- in economics, politics, lifestyle, relationships, and values.
It is quite likely we are heading for a singularity in

More ideas: http://pdfernhout.net/beyond-a-jobless-recovery-knol.html

On self-replicating space habitats:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/princeton-graduate-school-plans.html

The grad plans were about "Elysium" but for all. Contrast:
http://www.itsbetteruphere.com/
with, from me:
http://www.gardenwithinsight.com/solarius/

Related attempts, but not very successful so far:
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/
http://www.openvirgle.net/

David Brin on the Transparent society:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transparent_society

Related suggestions by me:
http://pcast.ideascale.com/a/dtd/The-need-for-FOSS-intelligence-tools-for-sensemaking-etc./76207-8319

A basic income would give more people more time for self-education and civic engagement and raising independent children. They would have more time to review all this data.

Alaska has a bit of a basic income. Brazil has something of one recently. Germany has been talking about one. The USA has a basic income for people over 65 called "Social Security", so it could just be extended to all from birth and replace things like public schooling and unemployment insurance.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income_guarantee

Of course, two countries that implemented something of them, Lybia and Iran have experienced US attempts to destabilize them. See also "the Threat of a Good Example" by Noam Chomsky:
http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Chomsky/ChomOdon_Example.html
"No country is exempt from U.S. intervention, no matter how unimportant. In fact, it's the weakest, poorest countries that often arouse the greatest hysteria. ..."

Still, once could argue a basic income just props up capitalism. I guess it depends how it is implemented and what people actually would do with their time.

See Marshall Brain's Manna for a fictional example with both a basic income and a transparent society.
http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

There are many reasons things change slowly. People are naturally resistant to change, since they know the old ways work somewhat at least in the past. New intellectual paradigms take a while to propagate. Some people are invested in the current system emotionally and financially, even as it crumbles or faces increasing catastrophic systemic risks. And so on.

Although, perhaps it is better to not know what "X" is now, if it will take decades to see it come into being, with so much needless suffering along the way? :-(

James P. Hogan's "Voyage From Yesteryear" is a good example of people not being willing to embrace "X" when it is staring them in the face.
http://www.jamesphogan.com/books/info.php?titleID=29&cmd=summary

Another "X" is vitamin D and good nutrition to prevent or reverse much chronic disease.
https://www.changemakers.com/discussions/discussion-493#comment-38823

But that's been know for thousands of years. It just gets forgotten now and then.
http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/62262-let-food-be-thy-medicine-and-medicine-be-thy-f

His writings help inspire the OSCOMAK idea by me starting about twenty five years ago, but it hasn't gone much anywhere: http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/

So, I know what you mean by these sorts of inspirations. A good sci-fi author helps us make a leap of imagination.

I'd recommend Hogan's "The Two Faces of Tomorrow" and his "Voyage From Yesteryear" especially for post-scarcity themes. But he touches on them in his other works too. Also check out his "Code of the Lifemaker" if you like the idea of seed factories.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_of_the_Lifemaker

So, if you like Iain Banks, you may like Hogan's writing. Sadly, James P Hogan died about three years ago of heart disease (which is generally reversible through great nutrition, see Dr. Joel Fuhrman).

Cool stuff that on Seed Factories. Check out the "Open Manufacturing" mailing list though for other people with related interests.
https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!forum/openmanufacturing

A key point I've discovered on post-scarcity perceptions and social choices (summarized in my sig):
http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html