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Our work from fifteen years ago: https://github.com/pdfernhout/PlantStudio
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/PlantStudio/
A user comment: "Plant Studio is the best 3d plant creator/animator that I have seen. Very nice job."

The idea can be used to design almost anything, even music (also by us):
http://www.evojazz.com/

Richard Dawkins had the idea first though (or others before him), as shown by his "Blind Watchmaker" software which we had seen before PlantStudio.

So, basically, for most people, 3D is hard because the dominant 3D software paradigm of assembling shapes via splines and meshes and such is too hard to use.

However, Minecraft (and Infiniminer before it) show another easy to use 3D design paradigm (assembling blocks).

There have been Star Trek episodes like that too, where people are on a Holodeck with their memories suppressed. That's also why, even having been in a PhD program in ecology and evolution, I have to accept it is possible that our universe is a simulation started 6000 years ago from some old backup.
http://www.simulation-argument.com/

Or that everything in it may have been designed with tools that involve interactive design of selections from variations, like software I co-wrote about designing plants and tunes:
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/PlantStudio/
http://www.evojazz.com/

The problem of course is that, even if true and interesting to contemplate, those sorts of beliefs are not very practical, like in understanding how the flu virus mutates every year, or in figuring out where mineral resources are likely located based on geological processes, and so on. Or even in understanding how religion may have come about and persisted in the first place (a point I first saw in someone's comment on slashdot a year or two ago):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionary_origin_of_religions
http://evolution-of-religion.com/
https://www.google.com/search?q=evolution+of+religion

I also think many scientists overreach -- moving from scientific statements about material things to an unackowledged theology of "scientistic materialsm" like Charles Tart points out.
http://blog.paradigm-sys.com/about-dr-tart/the-end-of-materialism/
"Of course there are nonsensical elements mixed in with religion and spirituality: that's true for all areas of human life. But to totally deny our spiritual nature, as science apparently does, harms and inhibits people. Indeed, a deeper look shows that it's not science that denies our spirituality, it's scientism, a rigid philosophy of materialism, masquerading as science."

Some suggest we are not Earthly beings on a spiritual journey, but rather are instead Spiritual beings on an earthly journey. If so, it is hard to say for sure what difference is makes how long that journey is -- whether 15 hours or 15 decades?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Dreams_May_Come

People also find it worthwhile to play plenty of video games that may only last a short time. So a reasonable skeptic has to accept a lot of things are possible and that our knowledge of all the levels of reality is apparently limited as human beings. Still, then there is the issue of what is useful to believe in this current reality as far as dealing with the pains and pleasures and relationships and values and challenges and so on that it presents.

From 2011: http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2368162&threshold=0&commentsort=0&mode=thread&cid=37016386
"Twirlip: Towards a 21st Century Worldwide Public Intelligence Desktop Platform for Collaborative Sensemaking, Analysis, Risk Assessment, and Horizon Scanning"

Around them, I also put together another proposal to collect and organize stories about security issues as a modernized "Risks Digest" using software like my wife desiged my wife wrote called "Rakontu":
http://www.rakontu.org/

Another spin on that from this month:
https://www.newschallenge.org/open/open-government/submission/civic-sensemaking-by-working-with-stories-using-rakontu/

With some more code links and a video here:
http://twirlip.com/

See also:
http://www.phibetaiota.net/2011/09/paul-fernhout-open-letter-to-the-intelligence-advanced-programs-research-agency-iarpa/

From 1999 to NASA, some ideas about rethinking our manufacturing infrastructure systematically and in an open source way:
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/

And also to DARPA in 1999:
"DARPA Progam Manager Position on Self-Replicating technology"
https://groups.google.com/forum/?hl=en&fromgroups=#!msg/virgle/feS-LaqnFyM/z0sqkvvCx2QJ
"We of course need to minimize military tensions around the world through arms control, international aid, and setting a good example. This delays the culmination of these other trend to war, but in my opinion will not prevent them because of ever-present potential for a small group of unstable people to use weapons of mass destruction. ... I also don't think we have a significant choice. Such self-replicating and self-repairing systems will be developed eventually anyway, if only from commercial competitive pressures. The only thing we can do is slow down their development. Yet that has its own risks of our current infrastructure being overwhelmed by current weapons of mass destruction or sophisticated terrorism. Also, should such self-replicating technology be developed first clandestinely by an oppressive regime, the consequences for the United States could be disastrous."

From 1987 for grad studies on improving security via self-replicating space habitats:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/princeton-graduate-school-plans.html

A long string of failed proposals. :-)

Well, at least I can still try to promote great ideas by others that have met with more success: :-)
"A Conceptual Framework for System Fault Tolerance"
http://hissa.nist.gov/chissa/SEI_Framework/framework_1.html

And I can keep on working towards those other ideas as very limited spare time permits.

I guess I am mostly just a creation of 1960s-1970s TV about our future in space -- to keep banging my head against the wall of space and security for decades? :-) Star Trek, The Starlost, Space 1999, Silent Running, Battlestar Galactica, Buck Rogers, Lost In Space, Thunderbirds, and so on... And way too many sci-fi novels. :-)

http://www2.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/change/left_and_right.html
"Although the [extreme] Right and [extreme] Left have major differences that make it almost impossible for them to agree on anything, they also have certain -- if not immediately apparent -- similarities as well. In fact, they are remarkably similar for how different they are. Since these similarities are of a type that tends to make them blind to any other view, these similarities further reinforce the dichotomy between them: that is, the similarities I am about to discuss make for more differences."

Without the internet and the world wide web on top of it, it is unlikely I could have learned so much or passed it on to others, like I mentioned in this essay from 2004:
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/AchievingAStarTrekSociety.html
"First, as a side note, I could not have written an essay like this before the World Wide Web -- I just would not have had the time to cover so many areas in a couple days writing from home, far from a university library, and relying on Google to make solid ideas that were just wisps of memory (from years of reading broadly on the web); nor would I before the wide adoption of the internet and email and the world wide web have been able to provide immediately accessible links for further exploration by readers, all at essentially no direct monetary cost. That is an example of the sort of exponential increase in technological capacity this essay is referring to. I certainly would not call this essay a scholarly work as it neither cites enough primary sources or connects all the dots, and I'm sure it has its share of flaws, but please consider it as a proof of concept that if even a little of what I write is true, there is enough to go around and make this Earth a more fantastic and more free place for every being on it. "

Good points, but my wife and I put more than six person-years on our own dime into making a free garden simulator so people could grow their own food on "Spaceship Earth" -- and it is also a step towards living in space because people in space need to eat too. There is an edited version of one of Rick Guidice's pictures as a backdrop in the add-on pack:
http://www.gardenwithinsight.com/

So a lot of the ideas are complimentary. You're using the internet now to make your point and some of that technology indirectly came out of the space program which pushed technology along, including satellite communications. The picture of Earth seen from space has (arguably) done probably more than any one single thing to unite our planet (especially the image with a small Earth in a sea of darkness)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:The_Earth_seen_from_Apollo_17.jpg

Thinking about things on a smaller scale like for a space habitat can focus the mind wonderfully on issues like recycling, meeting essential needs vs. expansive wants, being efficient in resource use, learning to get along with neighbors, sustaining human health without lots of expensive interventions, developing economic paradigms that are sustainable both socially and physically, and so on.

Anyway, one of the reasons for my not getting further directly on this is, beyond raising a next generation, actually investing significant my time on those topics you point to, for example education about health & nutrition and about transcending militarism & artificial scarcity:
http://www.changemakers.com/discussions/discussion-493#comment-38823
http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html
http://artificialscarcity.com/

But as I say, making good places to live in space and on Earth is complementary from a certain perspective, so it is not like that was wasted time in that sense in progressing towards space habitats.

Anyway, there are very few material resources in short supply on Earth. Pretty much all such shortages are politically motivated or the product of competitive economic tragedies or unaccounted for externalities. At the current rates of falling prices for solar, the world will be running off of mostly solar energy in 20 years unless something even better (like hot or cold fusion) is cheaper. As it is, probably at least 95% of the work done on Earth in the industrialized world is either useless or harmful to the common good, so there is plenty of spare capacity; see:
http://www.whywork.org/rethinking/whywork/abolition.html

As I wrote in 2008, (perhaps a bit wishfully as far as OSCOMAK itself, true):
http://oscomak.net/wiki/Main_Page
====
OSCOMAK supports playful learning communities of individuals and groups chaordically building free and open source knowledge, tools, and simulations which lay the groundwork for humanity's sustainable development on Spaceship Earth and eventual joyful, compassionate, and diverse expansion into space (including Mars, the Moon, the Asteroids, or elsewhere in the Universe).

You can read an essay on how to to find the financing to create a "Star Trek" like society here.
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/AchievingAStarTrekSociety.html

A flow into foundations of $55 trillion is expected over the next 25 years: "Is Open Source the Answer To Giving?"
http://news.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/04/20/

I had hoped to work on them while getting a PhD in the 1980s: http://www.pdfernhout.net/princeton-graduate-school-plans.html

Still trying to make them on-and-off:
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/SSI_Fernhout2001_web.html
http://oscomak.net/
http://openvirgle.net/

The human imagination is the ultimate resource (as economist Julian Simon said). What really killed the 1970s vision was Senator Proxmire's Golden Fleece Award. It's taken a long time to recover from that nastiness politically, coupled with other mistakes like the Shuttle (compared to cheap rockets with a return capsule). Plus computers have absorbed most of the creative energy that was going into the space program in the Apollo era.

The world itself has plenty of material resources and energy. We'll even probably have both hot and cold fusion soon which will make it easy to recycle everything. The real reason to go into space is about diversity, challenge, curiosity, exploration, community, and just room for more creativity -- to use space resources in space.

I took an undergrad course with Gerry O'Neill. He called me a "dreamer" for wanting to make self-replicating space habitats. :-) I was inspired by James P. Hogans's sci-fi novel "The Two Faces Of Tomorrow" which has a space habitats with an automated factory.
http://www.baenebooks.com/chapters/0671878484/0671878484.htm

I I later found out J.D. Bernal proposed them in the 1920s:
http://vserver1.cscs.lsa.umich.edu/~crshalizi/Bernal/world/

Gerry O'Neill anticipated there would be a slow capitalistic expansion into space, and built his plans around that. Sadly, US capitalism was not kind to any of his business plans (Geostar, LAWN) which he had hoped would fund more space ventures.

Meanwhile, the non-profit world of cooperation in cyberspace seems to be what is taking off, and what ultimately may get us space habitats (self-replicating or not). I tried a couple times over the past two decades to try to get his legacy non-profit SSI interested in supporting a free and open source effort towards developing space habitats. But I found the core there was still enamored of Gerry's old business plan of creating solar space satellites and using that to fund a slow expansion into space. That plan may have made sense in the 1970s, but it ignore today's reality that such satellites could be used as weapons, and the cost of solar power on Earth is falling exponentially, and local power storage is rapidly improving via batteries and fuel cells, etc.. Once we are in space for other reasons, maybe beamed power might make sense for either facories or to aircraft or laser launch systems.

Anyway, I'm still trying to keep some of the dream alive. Mostly, in my spare time, for decades I've been focused (too much) on making a triple-based social semantic desktop to organize all the needed information (while the world passed me by on that too, like with RDF and URLs and so on):
http://sourceforge.net/projects/pointrel/

It's been interesting, even if not too much obvious direct results to show for it.

I had hoped to work on them while getting a PhD in the 1980s: http://www.pdfernhout.net/princeton-graduate-school-plans.html

Still trying to make them on-and-off:
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/SSI_Fernhout2001_web.html
http://oscomak.net/
http://openvirgle.net/

The human imagination is the ultimate resource (as economist Julian Simon said). What really killed the 1970s vision was Senator Proxmire's Golden Fleece Award. It's taken a long time to recover from that nastiness politically, coupled with other mistakes like the Shuttle (compared to cheap rockets with a return capsule). Plus computers have absorbed most of the creative energy that was going into the space program in the Apollo era.

The world itself has plenty of material resources and energy. We'll even probably have both hot and cold fusion soon which will make it easy to recycle everything. The real reason to go into space is about diversity, challenge, curiosity, exploration, community, and just room for more creativity -- to use space resources in space.

I took an undergrad course with Gerry O'Neill. He called me a "dreamer" for wanting to make self-replicating space habitats. :-) I was inspired by James P. Hogans's sci-fi novel "The Two Faces Of Tomorrow" which has a space habitats with an automated factory.
http://www.baenebooks.com/chapters/0671878484/0671878484.htm

I I later found out J.D. Bernal proposed them in the 1920s:
http://vserver1.cscs.lsa.umich.edu/~crshalizi/Bernal/world/

Gerry O'Neill anticipated there would be a slow capitalistic expansion into space, and built his plans around that. Sadly, US capitalism was not kind to any of his business plans (Geostar, LAWN) which he had hoped would fund more space ventures.

Meanwhile, the non-profit world of cooperation in cyberspace seems to be what is taking off, and what ultimately may get us space habitats (self-replicating or not). I tried a couple times over the past two decades to try to get his legacy non-profit SSI interested in supporting a free and open source effort towards developing space habitats. But I found the core there was still enamored of Gerry's old business plan of creating solar space satellites and using that to fund a slow expansion into space. That plan may have made sense in the 1970s, but it ignore today's reality that such satellites could be used as weapons, and the cost of solar power on Earth is falling exponentially, and local power storage is rapidly improving via batteries and fuel cells, etc.. Once we are in space for other reasons, maybe beamed power might make sense for either facories or to aircraft or laser launch systems.

Anyway, I'm still trying to keep some of the dream alive. Mostly, in my spare time, for decades I've been focused (too much) on making a triple-based social semantic desktop to organize all the needed information (while the world passed me by on that too, like with RDF and URLs and so on):
http://sourceforge.net/projects/pointrel/

It's been interesting, even if not too much obvious direct results to show for it.

Good points. As I see it, the unknowns about human biochemistry and the genetic "code" have been like "security by obscurity" about an encryption algorithm that kept all human safe from intentional plagues (or mind control or suffering or whatever). Now that the obscurity is going away, for whatever well-intentioned reasons about curing illness, all humans are at ever increasing risk from engineered bioweapons. When our computer encryption "code" algorithms or their keys get compromised, we can generally replace the algorithm and/or keys. That is not possible when the human genetic code is fully understood. The risk will only continue to increase in that sense as our understanding of the genetic code increases. There may be ways to manage that risk through mutual security and intrinsic security and recognizing the irony of using post-scarcity technologies from a scarcity-biased world view, but it hard to get people raised in a scarcity-focused-culture to accept them. I discuss that at length here:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html
"Biological weapons like genetically-engineered plagues are ironic because they are about using advanced life-altering biotechnology to fight over which old-fashioned humans get to occupy the planet. Why not just use advanced biotech to let people pick their skin color, or to create living arkologies and agricultural abundance for everyone everywhere? ... 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."

As Bucky Fuller said, whether it will Utopia or Oblivion will be a touch-and-go relay race to the very end. Fears of bioterrorism have been one of several concerns motivating my efforts towards better information management and collective design software so that communities have some chance of transcending the threat somehow:
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/fears.htm
http://pcast.ideascale.com/a/dtd/-The-need-for-FOSS-intelligence-tools-for-sensemaking-etc.-/76207-8319

"Rather than observing how unworkable ST:TNG is in our current situation we should find ways to make it workable."

From 2004: http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/AchievingAStarTrekSociety.html

http://tmp2.wikia.com/wiki/Main_Page
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/

I agree risks have increased. We need to think bigger than just the risks though. At the same time, we need to think different on Earth: http://anwot.org/

Problem is, most people are still enmeshed in "scarcity" thinking -- even with the tools of abundance at their fingertips. So, rather than build solutions, we build drones to fight over the problems.

http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/fears.htm
====
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 unforeseen computer failure mode
        * Global warming / climate change / flooding
        * Nuclear / biological war
        * Unexpected economic collapse from Chaos effects
        * Terrorism w/ unforeseen 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)
        * Unforeseen consequences of research (energy, weapons, informational, biological)
====

The solution I proposed there was developing a free and open source distributed library of information about how to make things, working towards the goal of creating self-replicating space habitats that can duplicate themselves from sunlight and asteroidal ore.

However, since then I think the deepest issue is changing how we thing, so we can move beyond, as in my sig, the irony of using the technologies of abundance from a perspective of fighting over misperceived scarcity. Bucky Fuller talked about that too, in moving from "weaponry" to "livingry". See also:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html
http://anwot.org/

Here are some emails I wrote to Ray Kurzewil on these themes years ago that someone else put up on their site: http://heybryan.org/fernhout/

I essentially suggested that uploaded human minds would have their runtime consumed by the digital equivalent of natively-evolved digital piranha. I also suggested that the direction we come out of any singularity may have a lot to do with the moral direction we are pursuing as we go into it -- and that AI created mainly out of human military and economic competitiveness against other humans probably would not node well for having a happy singularity. That is why it is important to move our global society into a more compassionate direction before creating such AIs.

... free and open-source self-replicating space habitats rather than mainly just better rockets and/or space tourism? http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=62113&cid=5821178
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/
http://www.openvirgle.net/

"However, more analysis needs to be put into their plan; more requirements gathering and architecture is needed."

Something I tried to get NASA to support a dozen years ago: http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/

That said, the Factor e Farm people are really trying hard and making some progress in the general area. What is ridiculous is that this is not a top priority issue funded by NASA, NIST, and European counterparts with hundreds of thousands of reasonable paid engineers involved.

Another related idea I posted:
"Getting Greece and Iceland to be 99% self-sufficient by mass; international consortium"
https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups=#!msg/openmanufacturing/YzbzBFjeBkg/HXC7-XHSGLkJ
"Now, does this [Greece running out of tear gas during riots about economics] make any sense if you understand the possibilities of open manufacturing or an open society? In Greece you have a warm climate, access to oceans, lots of sun and wind, an educated populace with a 2000+ year history of democracy (on and off :-), no obvious external enemies declaring war, and so on. And they are so worried about their future ability to make and use things (which is how I translate "fears for Greece's economic future") that they are running out of tear gas? This all makes no *physical* sense. The place should be a paradise. Instead it is in "self-destruct mode" according to one editor. It must be *ideology*. Or, more correctly, ideology *embodied* in a certain type of productive infrastructure. ..."

The closes I know of from the US government is from the Carter presidency: http://www.islandone.org/MMSG/aasm/

Here is something more recent from NIST which is great but not quite as self-replication focused and only had about 20 staff involved (last I heard):
http://www.nist.gov/el/msid/lifecycle/sm_smo.cfm
http://www.nist.gov/el/msid/lifecycle/

Frankly, it feels to me like the failure of engineering academia in the USA to comprehensively work to analyze our productive processes is perhaps a reflection of how much a certain form of capitalist ideology infests US academia. It seems like it is heresy to even consider that anything other than some mystical "market" would decide what would be manufactured or how it would be made or moved between users, even though a lot of companies are being weighed down by supply chains they don't really understand or control. So, in academia you can study one tiny part of how something is made, but you can't try to create an approach to comprehend the whole because that goes against mainstream economic dogma of willful blindness about lifecycle consequences and comprehensive design. Only in a thought experiment like NASA might do about a moon base or something like that is it permitted to discuss the idea of comprehensive planning about how to make *everything* and take it all through a full lifecycle. Meanwhile, we drown in our own e-waste because externalities like disposal are not priced in up-front. Modern computer-based manufacturing has the potential to be so flexible that we could have, if not Star Trek replicators, at least the next best thing of small production runs and mass customization coming out of very flexible manufacturing lines (seem James P. Hogan's "The Two Faces of Tomorrow" for some descriptions of what that would look like, set in a space habitat).

Still, there is the RepRap project and such as an exception in academia. So, I think change is happening, slowly. Maybe the rate of change on this meme is growing exponentially though?

As I suggested a dozen years ago: http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/fears.htm
"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 ..."

See also though the root cause misperception: http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html
"Biological weapons like genetically-engineered plagues are ironic because they are about using advanced life-altering biotechnology to fight over which old-fashioned humans get to occupy the planet. Why not just use advanced biotech to let people pick their skin color, or to create living arkologies and agricultural abundance for everyone everywhere? ..."

Think of the unknowns surrounding DNA like a lock that kept us safe from ourselves. Removing those unknowns is like telling everyone how to open all the locks on the planet (including digital locks protecting nuclear weapons). That implies our culture needs to change if we are to survive. On my website I talk about some of that. Here is another good one: http://anwot.org/

"and respond to the takedown notices in my spare time."

That's certainly a good legal point, showing how far out society has regressed since the 1960s -- no only can't we put a human on the Moon anymore, but we can't even discuss it while including copies of forty year old documents (that should long ago have become public domain under any reasonable copyright regime).

Makes me think of:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Age_Ahead
"Using this and other examples, Jacobs argued that modern political and economic ideologies were in effect no different than those dominant in Western civilization's past Dark Ages, such as Middle Age Roman Catholicism. In both cases, she claimed, the dominant ideology prevented and discouraged people from finding rational and scientifically-verifiable explanations and solutions."

As Jane Jacobs says, a Dark Age is when a society has forgotten even that it used to know something. We seem to be getting there in spaceflight, a few recent small company proprietary successes aside, like SpaceX. In general, the USA has also made publicly discussing some aspects of rocketry and such illegal for military reasons.
http://www.exportlawblog.com/archives/439

Still, some people are trying to relearn things on a small scale:
http://www.smartplanet.com/photos/privately-funded-open-source-rocket-lifts-off-photos/6243520

My own, so far unsuccesful, steps in that direction, but others are succeeding in that idrection as part of an open manufacturing movement:
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/

From a site I maintain: http://www.openvirgle.net/

On April 1st, 2008, a fierce discussion started at Google's latest effort, Project Virgle. It proposed a grassroots effort to get a colony on Mars. What they didn't expect is that the Internet would respond so positively to what was hastily discovered as an April Fools Joke. Dissatisfied with what that first 24 hours of discussion and work represented, a number of members struck out to do what Google thought was only a joke, and start a real grassroots effort to inhabit space. Thus OpenVirgle was born, with every intention of gathering talent from across the globe, and focusing it all on creating ideas and ways in which humankind can live sustainably in space using free and open source technology.

This project remains a place for all space enthusiasts to cooperate in a playful learning community of individuals and groups chaordically building free and open source knowledge, tools, and simulations, which lay the groundwork for humanity's eventual joyful, compassionate, and diverse expansion into space (including Mars, the Moon, the Asteroids, or elsewhere in the Universe), and also pool our current resources to make all of these ideas a physical reality. We believe that humanity works much better when they work together, and that the fastest way to advance knowledge rapidly is to have it shared equally amongst the largest group possible.

OpenVirgle's mission is, first and foremost, the consolidation of information. There are many pro-space-settlement groups out there, each with great ideas. The problem is, they are all competitive for funding, and they can't seem to agree on space settlement tactics and technologies. We will attempt to bring together all of these ideas and all of this information, and put it all up for proper comparison and discussion. Hopefully, future groups, or future iterations of OpenVirgle ourselves, will be able to use this collected knowledge to "put our eggs into a few more baskets" than just Earth.

We hope to end a history of secrecy and paranoia surrounding high technology development, and bring us all together towards a larger shared purpose, pooling resources and sharing the benefits of our combined work with the entirety of the human race. Yes, it's idealistic, but all the best grassroots efforts are, and if you don't shoot for the stars, you will never leave the planet.

====

In practice though, over the last couple years, that energy has moved into the Open Manufacturing and DIY and Maker movements, which are more general. But the geenral idea is stil what will get us there. An SSI conference paper I presented on this theme in 2001:
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/SSI_Fernhout2001_web.html

"Without technology providing additional food, or transport from farms to tables, I believe the balance point for hunter-gatherers or subsistence agriculture has already been exceeded."

I agree that human population now likely exceeds the capacity for traditional hunter/gatherer lifestyles (maybe by several times). Increasing population density leading to more structured bureaucratic militarized societies is probably a big reason most hunter/gatherer societies were lost (attacked or assimilated or pushed away onto marginal lands to fade away). But that does not invalidate the truths that according to Marshall Sahlins hunter/gatherers had *more* free time than most of us today, and what work they did was very self-directed, often more like professional work of today.

Most (95%?) of the labor hours expended today in the USA tend to be about guarding, engaging in non-productive make-work, or is just destructive or competitively wasteful, or is trying to compensate for the other ills of the society from the previous problems. For example, most heart surgery is apparently worse than useless according to Dr. Joel Fuhrman:
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/PCI_angioplasty_article.aspx
Most schooling is harming kids according to John Taylor Gatto:
http://www.newciv.org/whole/schoolteacher.txt
Most farming (mainly for animal product production) is killing us and destroying our land:
http://www.ravediet.com/reviews.html
http://www.westernwatersheds.org/watmess/watmess_2002/2002html_summer/article6.htm
Much policing related to drug laws is destroying our communities:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incarceration_in_the_United_States
Most of US military use is making us less safe:
http://www.humanrightsfirst.org/our-work/law-and-security/torture-on-tv/less-safe/
http://www.cato.org/store/books/power-problem-how-american-military-dominance-makes-us-less-safe-less-prosperous-less-free-har
Most computer software development is unneeded; for example IBM had a perfectly good in-house Forth they could have used as a command line interpreter rather than pay Bill Gated for MS-DOS which he bought from someone else. Most Wall Street computerized trading is of little-to-negative social value (just high stakes zero-sum horse racing and putting the whole unregulated derivatives system at risk of systemic collapse).
Most college degrees are not worth it either economically or educationally:
http://shine.yahoo.com/work-money/why-college-may-not-worth-133900551.html
I could go on... And on.. And on...
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/AchievingAStarTrekSociety.html

So, figure out a way that we can stop doing all that 95%+ of excess wasteful labor, and we then would indeed have free time, and our collective standard of living would go up. But then how would people be able to afford to buy food and pay rent? (Thus a basic income or other alternatives become needed...)

My point is not that hunter/gather low-tech is better than high-tech. It is that both our current high-tech existence and our historical low-tech existence have different good and bad points. There are many forms of technology, too, (e.e.g the "appropriate technology" idea) so even high-tech and low-tech is a crude distinction when we are talking about com

"They all still afford college and everything else because they only buy what they need. They don't buy two cars per person, they make large meals and reuse leftovers, the first two kids get new clothing and everyone else has hand-me-downs, they go to cheaper schools, etc... Their cable and internet bills are the same as yours, they go to more community activities and have enough people to play board and card games with themselves so less expensive electronic gaming, they've got multiple people to split up the chores so everything gets done faster despite there being a little more work. It really isn't that harder to wash 6 dishes than wash and dry 2 dishes (another kid will do the drying of the 6 dishes). It's just as easy to read to four kids the same story as it is to read to two kids. Eventually the older kids will start helping out the younger kids, providing you with more time and the older kid better experience compared to an only child. Assuming all the kids don't hate each other, they've got their brothers and sisters who will back them up when needed thus less prone to depression and feeling like an outcast. There are many, many more examples. I'm not sure which large families you've seen, but the one's I've seen get by by having a more sustainable life style. Tax breaks don't out weight the cost of a kid. If they did, kids wouldn't be expensive and everyone would have many. Each kid after 2 or 3 becomes cheaper than the last."

Mod parent up. With a solar system that is almost entirely empty, I'm just shocked to see all the people on Slashdot celebrating low fertility. Sure, a small cafe (the Earth) in a big city (the Solar system) may have an occupancy limit, but we don't go around telling people not to have kids because some cafe is too crowded. People generally just open another cafe...

Here is a step towards how:
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/SSI_Fernhout2001_web.html
http://pcast.ideascale.com/a/dtd/A-global-effort-to-develop-self-replicating-space-habitats/76206-8319

And here is why:
http://scienceworld.wolfram.com/biography/Tsiolkovsky.html
"Russian physicist and theoretical father of rocketry. Tsiolkovsky was the son of a Polish deportee to Siberia. Tsiolkovsky was an inventor and aviation engineer who was also an insightful visionary. As early as 1894, he designed a monoplane which subsequently flew in 1915. He also built the first Russian wind tunnel in 1897. In 1903, as part of a series of articles in a Russian aviation magazine, Tsiolkovsky published the rocket equation, Eric Weisstein's World of Physics and in 1929, a theory of multistage rockets. Tsiolkovsky was also the author of Investigations of Outer Space by Rocket Devices (1911) and Aims of Astronauts (1914). One of Tsiolkovsky's many memorable and inspiring quotes is "Mankind will not forever remain on Earth, but in the pursuit of light and space will first timidly emerge from the bounds of the atmosphere, and then advance until he has conquered the whole of circumsolar space" (1911). Tsiolkovsky's most famous quote is, "Earth is the cradle of humanity, but one cannot remain in the cradle forever." "

The more people, the more vision and imagination...
http://www.juliansimon.com/writings/Ultimate_Resource/

This "overpopulation" meme is so short sighted and despairing. Someday maybe we will see potential parents getting obsessed with "pleasure traps" of modern technology as perhaps a bad thing, rather than something that is now celebrated. Industrialized populations (especially places like Japan and Italy, and even the USA just about without immigration) are no longer even replacing themselves and their populations demographically will fall. Where does tha

From: 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 project's short-term benefits will include

* technology education,
* historical education,
* collaboration,
* sustainable technology development,
* public science literacy, and
* knowledge democratization.

The project's ultimate long-term goal will be to generate a repository of knowledge that will support the design and creation of space settlements. Three forces -- individual creativity, social collaboration, and technological tools -- will join to create a synergistic effort stronger than any of these forces could produce alone. We hope to use the internet to produce an effect somewhat like that described in "The Skills of Xanadu" by Theodore Sturgeon (available in his book The Golden Helix).

We will develop software tools to enable the creation of this knowledge repository: to collect, organize, and present information in a way that encourages collaboration and provides immediate benefit. Manufacturing "recipes" will form the core elements of the repository. We will also seed the repository, interact with participants, and oversee the evolution of the repository.

You can read a paper we presented on this project in the Proceedings of the Thirteenth SSI/Princeton Conference on Space Manufacturing May 7-9, 2001, which we have made available on the web: here.
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/SSI_Fernhout2001_web.html
The slides for the presentation are here.
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/KFReviewPaperForSSIConference2001.pdf

You can read an essay on how to to find the financing to create a "Star Trek" like society here.
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/AchievingAStarTrekSociety.html ...

It is the aim of this project to create an open-source community centered around applications and knowledge related to space settlement. To gain the broadest participation, the project will also include knowledge related to terrestrial settlements. The initial focus will be on collecting "manufacturing recipes" on how to make things: for example, how to make a 1930's style lathe. Information collected will range from historical interest (fabrication techniques of the stone age to make flint knives) to current (fabrication techniques to make stainless steel knives) to futuristic (fabrication techniques requiring nanotechnology to make diamond knives). This project will involve potentially hundreds of thousands of individuals across the globe. It is expected that ultimately millions of individuals (many in developing nations) will benefit from use of this database directly or indirectly.

====

Still working on it on and off, been about a quarter century...
"Self-Replicating Space Habitat graduate school purpose and plans from 1988"
http://www.pdfernhout.net/princeton-graduate-school-plans.html

I've been mostly working towards a social semantic desktop to support the creative, organizational, and analysis parts. And still not much to show for it. :-)

See also:
http://www.openvirgle.net/

Although I'd suggest looking hard at OpenLuna, TMP2, the Mars Society's efforts, Open Source Ecology, the Lifeboat Foun

From: 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 project's short-term benefits will include

* technology education,
* historical education,
* collaboration,
* sustainable technology development,
* public science literacy, and
* knowledge democratization.

The project's ultimate long-term goal will be to generate a repository of knowledge that will support the design and creation of space settlements. Three forces -- individual creativity, social collaboration, and technological tools -- will join to create a synergistic effort stronger than any of these forces could produce alone. We hope to use the internet to produce an effect somewhat like that described in "The Skills of Xanadu" by Theodore Sturgeon (available in his book The Golden Helix).

We will develop software tools to enable the creation of this knowledge repository: to collect, organize, and present information in a way that encourages collaboration and provides immediate benefit. Manufacturing "recipes" will form the core elements of the repository. We will also seed the repository, interact with participants, and oversee the evolution of the repository.

You can read a paper we presented on this project in the Proceedings of the Thirteenth SSI/Princeton Conference on Space Manufacturing May 7-9, 2001, which we have made available on the web: here.
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/SSI_Fernhout2001_web.html
The slides for the presentation are here.
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/KFReviewPaperForSSIConference2001.pdf

You can read an essay on how to to find the financing to create a "Star Trek" like society here.
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/AchievingAStarTrekSociety.html ...

It is the aim of this project to create an open-source community centered around applications and knowledge related to space settlement. To gain the broadest participation, the project will also include knowledge related to terrestrial settlements. The initial focus will be on collecting "manufacturing recipes" on how to make things: for example, how to make a 1930's style lathe. Information collected will range from historical interest (fabrication techniques of the stone age to make flint knives) to current (fabrication techniques to make stainless steel knives) to futuristic (fabrication techniques requiring nanotechnology to make diamond knives). This project will involve potentially hundreds of thousands of individuals across the globe. It is expected that ultimately millions of individuals (many in developing nations) will benefit from use of this database directly or indirectly.

====

Still working on it on and off, been about a quarter century...
"Self-Replicating Space Habitat graduate school purpose and plans from 1988"
http://www.pdfernhout.net/princeton-graduate-school-plans.html

I've been mostly working towards a social semantic desktop to support the creative, organizational, and analysis parts. And still not much to show for it. :-)

See also:
http://www.openvirgle.net/

Although I'd suggest looking hard at OpenLuna, TMP2, the Mars Society's efforts, Open Source Ecology, the Lifeboat Foun

From: 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 project's short-term benefits will include

* technology education,
* historical education,
* collaboration,
* sustainable technology development,
* public science literacy, and
* knowledge democratization.

The project's ultimate long-term goal will be to generate a repository of knowledge that will support the design and creation of space settlements. Three forces -- individual creativity, social collaboration, and technological tools -- will join to create a synergistic effort stronger than any of these forces could produce alone. We hope to use the internet to produce an effect somewhat like that described in "The Skills of Xanadu" by Theodore Sturgeon (available in his book The Golden Helix).

We will develop software tools to enable the creation of this knowledge repository: to collect, organize, and present information in a way that encourages collaboration and provides immediate benefit. Manufacturing "recipes" will form the core elements of the repository. We will also seed the repository, interact with participants, and oversee the evolution of the repository.

You can read a paper we presented on this project in the Proceedings of the Thirteenth SSI/Princeton Conference on Space Manufacturing May 7-9, 2001, which we have made available on the web: here.
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/SSI_Fernhout2001_web.html
The slides for the presentation are here.
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/KFReviewPaperForSSIConference2001.pdf

You can read an essay on how to to find the financing to create a "Star Trek" like society here.
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/AchievingAStarTrekSociety.html ...

It is the aim of this project to create an open-source community centered around applications and knowledge related to space settlement. To gain the broadest participation, the project will also include knowledge related to terrestrial settlements. The initial focus will be on collecting "manufacturing recipes" on how to make things: for example, how to make a 1930's style lathe. Information collected will range from historical interest (fabrication techniques of the stone age to make flint knives) to current (fabrication techniques to make stainless steel knives) to futuristic (fabrication techniques requiring nanotechnology to make diamond knives). This project will involve potentially hundreds of thousands of individuals across the globe. It is expected that ultimately millions of individuals (many in developing nations) will benefit from use of this database directly or indirectly.

====

Still working on it on and off, been about a quarter century...
"Self-Replicating Space Habitat graduate school purpose and plans from 1988"
http://www.pdfernhout.net/princeton-graduate-school-plans.html

I've been mostly working towards a social semantic desktop to support the creative, organizational, and analysis parts. And still not much to show for it. :-)

See also:
http://www.openvirgle.net/

Although I'd suggest looking hard at OpenLuna, TMP2, the Mars Society's efforts, Open Source Ecology, the Lifeboat Foun

From: 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 project's short-term benefits will include

* technology education,
* historical education,
* collaboration,
* sustainable technology development,
* public science literacy, and
* knowledge democratization.

The project's ultimate long-term goal will be to generate a repository of knowledge that will support the design and creation of space settlements. Three forces -- individual creativity, social collaboration, and technological tools -- will join to create a synergistic effort stronger than any of these forces could produce alone. We hope to use the internet to produce an effect somewhat like that described in "The Skills of Xanadu" by Theodore Sturgeon (available in his book The Golden Helix).

We will develop software tools to enable the creation of this knowledge repository: to collect, organize, and present information in a way that encourages collaboration and provides immediate benefit. Manufacturing "recipes" will form the core elements of the repository. We will also seed the repository, interact with participants, and oversee the evolution of the repository.

You can read a paper we presented on this project in the Proceedings of the Thirteenth SSI/Princeton Conference on Space Manufacturing May 7-9, 2001, which we have made available on the web: here.
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/SSI_Fernhout2001_web.html
The slides for the presentation are here.
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/KFReviewPaperForSSIConference2001.pdf

You can read an essay on how to to find the financing to create a "Star Trek" like society here.
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/AchievingAStarTrekSociety.html ...

It is the aim of this project to create an open-source community centered around applications and knowledge related to space settlement. To gain the broadest participation, the project will also include knowledge related to terrestrial settlements. The initial focus will be on collecting "manufacturing recipes" on how to make things: for example, how to make a 1930's style lathe. Information collected will range from historical interest (fabrication techniques of the stone age to make flint knives) to current (fabrication techniques to make stainless steel knives) to futuristic (fabrication techniques requiring nanotechnology to make diamond knives). This project will involve potentially hundreds of thousands of individuals across the globe. It is expected that ultimately millions of individuals (many in developing nations) will benefit from use of this database directly or indirectly.

====

Still working on it on and off, been about a quarter century...
"Self-Replicating Space Habitat graduate school purpose and plans from 1988"
http://www.pdfernhout.net/princeton-graduate-school-plans.html

I've been mostly working towards a social semantic desktop to support the creative, organizational, and analysis parts. And still not much to show for it. :-)

See also:
http://www.openvirgle.net/

Although I'd suggest looking hard at OpenLuna, TMP2, the Mars Society's efforts, Open Source Ecology, the Lifeboat Foun

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

Never really got off the ground so far though...

See also this paper I co-wrote and presented to the 2001 SSI conference on doing all that as an open-source project:
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/SSI_Fernhout2001_web.html

Or my graduate school plans from the 1980s:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/princeton-graduate-school-plans.html

Of course, decades later, this may all seem obvious. I've ended up working more more towards a general purpose social-semantic desktop ideas, while thankfully the rest of the world is finally starting to embrace an open source "maker" movement (but with scattered and poorly-integrated tools and repositories). I agree we need better analysis tools for all this, as well as better standards for encoding manufacturing knowledge.

Some other ideas I've posted towards encouraging that:
http://opengov.ideascale.com/a/dtd/21-000-Flexible-Public-Fabrication-Facilities-across-the-USA/8412-4049
http://pcast.ideascale.com/a/dtd/A-global-effort-to-develop-self-replicating-space-habitats/76206-8319
http://pcast.ideascale.com/a/dtd/The-need-for-FOSS-intelligence-tools-for-sensemaking-etc./76207-8319
http://pcast.ideascale.com/a/dtd/Towards-building-a-21st-century-society-in-the-USA-through-open-research/44914-8319

Or:
"Getting Greece and Iceland to be 99% self-sufficient by mass; international consortium"
https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!topic/openmanufacturing/YzbzBFjeBkg

A high degree of automation also probably requires a new vision for "economics", and I've written on that as well on my website (about moving towards a more "Star Trek" like economy).

This all has encountered tremendous resistance/apathy for a variety of reasons. Part of that resistance is probably that trying to talk about manufacturing webs goes against the grain of capitalism, which focuses on lots of narrowly-defined actors who try to socialize all their costs of producing one strand of the web as externalities while privatizing their profits and creating intellectual rent-seeking monopolies to lock those profits in indefinitely. For example, when I was in grad school at Princeton in the 1980s in Operatiosn Research, the professors were very excited about "picking up nickles before a steam roller" (make short term profits while ignoring systemic risk). To talk about systemic risk, or ways to deal with that, went against a narrow short-term focus on profitable optimizations (the kind that lead to lots of industry support and related grants). Thus, ironically, all those professors who contributed intellectually to our current economic disaster (for the 99%) were heavily rewarded for decades with resources and prestige, and then they get to shrug off the disaster their ideas helped cause as an unpredictable "black swan" economic event. Those who tried to do anything about it pro-actively were essentially punished. :-) Such is life, I guess. I'm glad that overall alternatives continue to emerge. A book related to why interdisciplinary work that goes against current cultural grain is so hard to do:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disciplined_Minds

Still, I thi

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

Never really got off the ground so far though...

See also this paper I co-wrote and presented to the 2001 SSI conference on doing all that as an open-source project:
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/SSI_Fernhout2001_web.html

Or my graduate school plans from the 1980s:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/princeton-graduate-school-plans.html

Of course, decades later, this may all seem obvious. I've ended up working more more towards a general purpose social-semantic desktop ideas, while thankfully the rest of the world is finally starting to embrace an open source "maker" movement (but with scattered and poorly-integrated tools and repositories). I agree we need better analysis tools for all this, as well as better standards for encoding manufacturing knowledge.

Some other ideas I've posted towards encouraging that:
http://opengov.ideascale.com/a/dtd/21-000-Flexible-Public-Fabrication-Facilities-across-the-USA/8412-4049
http://pcast.ideascale.com/a/dtd/A-global-effort-to-develop-self-replicating-space-habitats/76206-8319
http://pcast.ideascale.com/a/dtd/The-need-for-FOSS-intelligence-tools-for-sensemaking-etc./76207-8319
http://pcast.ideascale.com/a/dtd/Towards-building-a-21st-century-society-in-the-USA-through-open-research/44914-8319

Or:
"Getting Greece and Iceland to be 99% self-sufficient by mass; international consortium"
https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!topic/openmanufacturing/YzbzBFjeBkg

A high degree of automation also probably requires a new vision for "economics", and I've written on that as well on my website (about moving towards a more "Star Trek" like economy).

This all has encountered tremendous resistance/apathy for a variety of reasons. Part of that resistance is probably that trying to talk about manufacturing webs goes against the grain of capitalism, which focuses on lots of narrowly-defined actors who try to socialize all their costs of producing one strand of the web as externalities while privatizing their profits and creating intellectual rent-seeking monopolies to lock those profits in indefinitely. For example, when I was in grad school at Princeton in the 1980s in Operatiosn Research, the professors were very excited about "picking up nickles before a steam roller" (make short term profits while ignoring systemic risk). To talk about systemic risk, or ways to deal with that, went against a narrow short-term focus on profitable optimizations (the kind that lead to lots of industry support and related grants). Thus, ironically, all those professors who contributed intellectually to our current economic disaster (for the 99%) were heavily rewarded for decades with resources and prestige, and then they get to shrug off the disaster their ideas helped cause as an unpredictable "black swan" economic event. Those who tried to do anything about it pro-actively were essentially punished. :-) Such is life, I guess. I'm glad that overall alternatives continue to emerge. A book related to why interdisciplinary work that goes against current cultural grain is so hard to do:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disciplined_Minds

Still, I thi

Computers have imporved a lot since the old USSR. How does your computer with billions of transistors know how to move information around inside itself to meet your needs without using money inside it?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transistor_count

How does Debian know what software to make and maintain? Can emails and chat messages act as currency?

Soon we will have print-on-demand with 3D printers. Does that not also change things? We may also have recycle-on-demand with nanotech devices.

An alternative idea for designing sustainable and flourishing economies:
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/

Even if capitalism coudl be made to work sustainably (including if externalities are accounted for through government regulation, taxes, and subsidies), then we still need a basic income to make sure the market hears the needs of everyone. See, from 1964:
http://www.educationanddemocracy.org/FSCfiles/C_CC2a_TripleRevolution.htm
"The industrial system was designed to produce an ever-increasing quantity of goods as efficiently as possible, and it was assumed that the distribution of the power to purchase these goods would occur almost automatically. The continuance of the income-through-jobs link as the only major mechanism for distributing effective demand -- for granting the right to consume -- now acts as the main brake on the almost unlimited capacity of a cybernated productive system."

Or more recently, from the "free" encyclopedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income_guarantee

Ironically, it is EU regulations that forced a lot of this cleanup (as another poster commented on).

Mine from 1999: http://kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/fears.htm

"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)"

Some ideas about managing such risks: http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html
http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/msg/2846ca1b6bee64e1

"True again, except that we have to build giant structures with radiation shielding and artificial gravity, no easy feat."

Yes, but with automation to help we could do that. If we can learn to live in zero gravity, other possibilities open up like Marshall Savage talked about in the Millennial Project with Asgard habitats that were basically bubbles with a two meter thick layer of water at the surface between two layers of transparent plastic.
http://tmp2.wikia.com/wiki/Asgard
http://oceania.org/images/plate6.jpg
http://oceania.org/images/plate7.jpg

There are at least four ways I know of in theory to support good bone health in space (even assuming astronauts in space were not just vitamin D deficient since the RDA was ten times too low). People can wear clothes designed to provide resistance. People can live in a liquid environment that provides resistance (possibly breathing an oxygen enriched liquid) -- since whales do OK in effectively zero G. People could take (hypothetical) medicines to prevent bone loss. People could have their DNA altered.
http://www.oscomak.net/wiki/Liquid_breathing_to_resist_bone_loss

Obviously, more research is needed for all of them. The big thing is that it is not clear if mammals always need gravity for babies to develop in a healthy way. Example: http://www.welcometospaceblog.com/2011/09/babies-in-space.html

I would agree we should solve our problems on Earth first, rather than export a tragic way of thinking. Related ideas (the last two by me):
http://www.anwot.org/
http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/

We seem to know answers to the social problems (stuff like a basic income, unschooling and life-long learning, advanced conflict resolution techniques, and so on). The problem seems more putting them into practice against entrenched interests ranging from short-sighted billionaires (of the 1%) with a narrow sense of self, to public school unions, to those who profit from war, to the rest of us (99%) and social inertia with fear of change even as our technosphere is quickly changing. I think we could easily do much better socially than this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World_Inside

As for scams and Rossi's Cold Fusion E-Cat device, I agree it is very suspicious -- it's just at the edge of plausibility, and he could easily dispel any doubt with some better testing. But in general, whether that pans out (we'll know soon), we have lots of energy alternatives, being developed including thorium power, hot fusion, solar PV, solar thermal, and more.
http://www.caelusgreenroom.com/2011/05/26/torresol-opens-world%E2%80%99s-first-molten-salt-c-s-p-plant-ecoseed/

I was a Senior Associate with the Space Studies Institute in the late 1980s (just meant I gave them money). I thought the space power idea was interesting then and it might have made sense then -- even though I suggested to Gerry O'Neill (I took a class with him) that we should build self-replicating space habitats instead -- he called *me* a dreamer. :-) He saw that we would have a slow industrial expansion into space driven by capitalism (which I now think is baloney because we will be moving beyond money soon enough with 3D printers and robotics and s

Wow!

Decades ago, in ninth grade biology class, I asked my biology teacher how a Hydra (or other creatures) knows how to form its shape from cells, but he hemmed and hawed, and essentially would not admit that he did not know, or even that no one knew. We had been supposed to look at some Hydra in class, but they never arrived or something like that. I later studied Hydra in Ecology and Evolution grad studies, but people still did not quite know how they formed their shapes.

A couple lessons there for me I guess including the one about some teachers and authority:
http://www.newciv.org/whole/schoolteacher.txt
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/16a.htm

In pretty much every other way he was a great teacher from my point of view back then though (aside from not being willing to admit he did not know something), because he went covered a lot of material in an interesting way, and was obviously very proud of his knowledge. He definitely sparked my interest in biology with the way he ran the class, the way he handled that question aside. Anyway, thanks for everything Mr. Nast -- one of your students went on to biology graduate studies and making biology-related software made possible by the great job you did in some blue collar high school on Long Island.

Plants work somewhat differently from animals though. My wife and I implicitly used some of the ideas related to auxins etc. in this software we wrote to breed virtual 3D plants:
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/PlantStudio/
https://github.com/pdfernhout/PlantStudio/blob/master/README.txt

For another alternative, check out my comment here:
"PlantStudio Evolutionary 3D Software"
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2443828&cid=37504222

For information about software my wife and I wrote for breeding 3D plants (about fifteen years ago):
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/PlantStudio/
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/PlantStudio/userssay.htm
https://github.com/pdfernhout/PlantStudio/blob/master/README.txt

And now breeding music:
http://www.evojazz.com/
https://market.android.com/details?id=com.evojazz

For the plants, we tried to use rules similar to what nature uses for most plants. The music one is more random and could be a lot better.

So, yes, they could make this a lot better. In general, what such a tool needs is support for a parameterizable model, where the parameters can be bred, and eventually the models themselves can be bred.

But with that said, I agree with all the hype that this is a big part of the future of 3D. We got lots of positive feedback about PlantStudio. We just ran out of money to keep developing it back then, and had to work for years at places like IBM Research on unrelated stuff to repay living expenses debt we incurred while writing it and related software (an educational garden simulator) and then got distracted with various life events and other projects.

Anyway, I wish the Cornell people the best of luck as long as the system is free and open source. And if it is not open source (I don't know) they should read this: :-)
http://www.pdfernhout.net/open-letter-to-grantmakers-and-donors-on-copyright-policy.html
http://www.pdfernhout.net/on-funding-digital-public-works.html

For another alternative, check out my comment here:
"PlantStudio Evolutionary 3D Software"
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2443828&cid=37504222

For information about software my wife and I wrote for breeding 3D plants (about fifteen years ago):
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/PlantStudio/
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/PlantStudio/userssay.htm
https://github.com/pdfernhout/PlantStudio/blob/master/README.txt

And now breeding music:
http://www.evojazz.com/
https://market.android.com/details?id=com.evojazz

For the plants, we tried to use rules similar to what nature uses for most plants. The music one is more random and could be a lot better.

So, yes, they could make this a lot better. In general, what such a tool needs is support for a parameterizable model, where the parameters can be bred, and eventually the models themselves can be bred.

But with that said, I agree with all the hype that this is a big part of the future of 3D. We got lots of positive feedback about PlantStudio. We just ran out of money to keep developing it back then, and had to work for years at places like IBM Research on unrelated stuff to repay living expenses debt we incurred while writing it and related software (an educational garden simulator) and then got distracted with various life events and other projects.

Anyway, I wish the Cornell people the best of luck as long as the system is free and open source. And if it is not open source (I don't know) they should read this: :-)
http://www.pdfernhout.net/open-letter-to-grantmakers-and-donors-on-copyright-policy.html
http://www.pdfernhout.net/on-funding-digital-public-works.html

We did this 15 years ago: http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/PlantStudio/

The approach and interface has a lot of similarities.

An open source version (in Python):
https://github.com/pdfernhout/PlantStudio/

Recent musical version: :-)
https://market.android.com/details?id=com.evojazz

"There are no games which are not violent."

http://familypastimes.com/
"Family Pastimes games are the inventions of Jim Deacove. Jim started making co-operative games for his own family, and was encouraged by friends to make more. The Deacove family was and is no different from others. Sharing toys, helping mom and dad and being kind to others are values taught in all homes. To find games which help reinforce such sharing attitudes, however, is very difficult. Thus, Jim and Ruth felt the need to create some."

Also:
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1713701812/co-opoly-the-game-of-cooperatives/posts/105473

And:
http://www.share-international.org/archives/cooperation/i_cooperation.htm
http://www.share-international.org/archives/cooperation/co_nocontest.htm
"Kohn argues that the 'sacred cow' of competition stands on four mythological legs."

But yes, alternatives to competitive games in the USA can be much harder to find.

My wife and I invested over six-person years trying to create non-violent video game alternatives in the 1990s when everyone was saying how important that was, and mostly all we got for that ourselves was having to spend many years working for others to pay off debt.
http://www.gardenwithinsight.com/
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/nsfprop.htm

Still, Minecraft is a new popular mostly cooperative game that I can recommend if you want one (although get your vitamin D from supplements if you spend a lot of time indoors playing it):
http://www.minecraft.net/

I would have been very proud to have made something that good and also that popular which created a huge cooperating user community. I have immense respect for Mojang AB in that sense.

I wrote this up last month as a proposal abstract for an IARPA soliciation, but I have not sent it (someone who had been with the CIA and does public intelligence said it would be pointless essentially as the US intelligence community is so broken). Anyway, I though I'd post it here, as I've written it already, and it seems a shame to waste it, and because it is what I'd like to do maybe for this solicitation. Any constructive feedback would be appreciated. Maybe DARPA might be interested in it if not IARPA, given the structural problems in the US intelligence community it seeks to address and which are part of why the US cyber infrastructure is so at risk? Imagine global security researchers having a tool like this to work collectively for mutual benefit to maximize the intrinsic security of our cyber infrastructure. I know some people may say terrible things about any attempt to engage with the US security apparatus (not without some justification), but, beyond being motivated by running out of cash (in part by doing so much free stuff), I do think the issue is that we all need security -- the issue is how we go about getting it. This proposal attempts to shift the US security paradigm in a more intrinsic and mutual direction, which is more sustainable over the long term than a focus on extrinsic (guarded) or unilateral (dominance) security. Maybe others might find the general concept of shifting the security paradigm useful in their own proposals.

====

Title: "Twirlip: Towards a 21st Century Worldwide Public Intelligence Desktop Platform for Collaborative Sensemaking, Analysis, Risk Assessment, and Horizon Scanning"

Company: Kurtz-Fernhout Software
Organizational form: Woman-owned small business (Cynthia F. Kurtz, CEO)

Prepared: July 12, 2011

Amount requested: US$297,000

Responding to: IARPA Incisive Analysis Office Wide Broad Agency Announcement (BAA) Solicitation Number: IARPA-BAA-10-08, especially these aspects:
* Methods for measuring and improving human judgment and human reasoning
* Understanding and managing massive, dynamic data
* Effective analysis of massive, unreliable, and diverse data
* Assessing relevancy of new data
* Analysis of significant societal events
* Estimation and communication of uncertainty and risk

Summary: As a legacy from the 20th century, there are currently broad institutional barriers in the US intelligence community that make it difficult for intelligence analysts to gain 21st century insights into 21st century issues using 21st century technology and 21st century public data sources. To address the need to move beyond those institutional barriers, we propose a proof-of-concept project called "Twirlip" as a free and open source software (GPL) Public Intelligence desktop platform for the general public. It would use Java/JVM desktop technologies and CouchDB as a backend relay server and indexed archive. It would be built around the idea of a social semantic desktop. The public can then use this system to process open source data to crowdsource sensemaking and analysis about global socioeconomic, technical, and geopolitical trends, with a special emphasis on understanding the likely global consequences of Moore's law. The global community can also expand this platform in various ways by adding new freely licensed modules. The US intelligence community can then build on this public software and public content in its own internal sensemaking and analysis. Supporting this system by IARPA may create both a strategic first mover advantage and a public relations advantage for the US intelligence community. Whether the software is of any use to the US intelligence community directly is not as important as whether the community gets new ideas from seeing what the public does with such tools or seeing how such tools are expanded.

Technical/Administrative contact:
Paul D. Fernhout, CTO
Kurtz-Fernhout Software ...
Website: http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/

http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/
http://www.pdfernhout.net/sunrise-sustainable-technology-ventures.html
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/SSI_Fernhout2001_web.html

At least I tried to get the ideas out there. But great minds think alike, so it may well be independent invention. :-)

Good luck to the new merger. Too bad it is not centered aroun free and open source software for the CAD side.

http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/
http://www.pdfernhout.net/sunrise-sustainable-technology-ventures.html
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/SSI_Fernhout2001_web.html

At least I tried to get the ideas out there. But great minds think alike, so it may well be independent invention. :-)

Good luck to the new merger. Too bad it is not centered aroun free and open source software for the CAD side.

(I worked on) Music: https://market.android.com/details?id=com.evojazz
3D plants: http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/PlantStudio/

Ultimately, what kind of effect will this have on employment as robotics and AI get more and more creative? See:
    http://scienceblogs.com/notrocketscience/2009/04/enter_adam_the_robot_scientist.php

Here is a 12 minute YouTube video I recently made that talks about a balance between five interwoven economies that shifts with cultural change and technological change:
    "Five Interwoven Economies: Subsistence, Gift, Exchange, Planned, and Theft"
      http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4vK-M_e0JoY

So, I help provide evolutionary tools that will change the value of most paid human labor, but I also provide ideas about how to upgrade our society to accomodate that.

But so many people just make the tools and don't think about the human consequences yet. I hope more and more people start thinking about all this. My writings are just a place to start...

First off, you are not clear about what percentage of petroleum becomes plastics and lubricants, and what is burned. I'd suggest the part used for products is relatively small. One example:
    http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview/id/770859.html
"The manufacture of all plastics consumed approximately three percent of the total petroleum used in the US in 1997, and PS production comprised approximately .002 percent of that amount. Comparatively, 71 percent of total petroleum used in the US is used for gasoline, jet, and diesel fuel, and 26 percent for the production of asphalt, oils and lubricants."

Most drugs are essentially a scam anyway, compared to eating better:
    http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/foodpyramid.aspx

Also, plastics and many other products including lubricants can be derived from other sources, such as plants, and things can be redesigned with magnetic bearings to reduce lubrication needs. Example:
    http://www.maglevwindturbine.com/

Asphalt can be replaced at possibly less cost by solar roadways:
    http://www.solarroadways.com/

I've worked a bit over the years towards systems that would help people figure out how to do that:
    http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/

So, we have lots of options. We don't have to pollute or otherwise destroy our world for the reasons you suggest. We have plenty of alternatives.

That said, I'm not going to disagree that you make a good point about integrated systems. But your tone suggests you have not really looked into alternatives. Why is that?

An I wrote about on Slashdot was it approaching a decade ago?
    "Both CATS and DOGS are needed... (Score:2)"
    http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?cid=5821178&sid=62113

See also, from J.D. Bernal in the 1920s(!):
    http://www.cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/Bernal/world/
"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. The initial stages of construction are the most difficult to imagine. They will probably consist of attaching an asteroid of some hundred years or so diameter to a space vessel, hollowing it out and using the removed material to build the first protective shell. Afterwards the shell could be re-worked, bit by bit, using elaborated and more suitable substances and at the same time increasing its size by diminishing its thickness. The globe would fulfil all the functions by which our earth manages to support life. In default of a gravitational field it has, perforce, to keep its atmosphere and the greater portion of its life inside; but as all its nourishment comes in the form of energy through its outer surface it would be forced to resemble on the whole an enormously complicated single-celled plant."

We can do this, and we can support quadrillions of people (and other beings) living in the solar system in space habitats. The only question is if we want to.

So, while there may be limits to growth, we are nowhere near them when considering the solar system.

That article is just ignorant in part because it ignores things like laser launched craft or possibly the new cold fusion ideas (by Rossi, if they work out):
    http://pesn.com/2011/04/07/9501805_Rossi_Cold_Fusion_Validated_by_Swedish_Skeptics_Society/

Also, it says resources are not concentrated, but that is what energy and robots are for.

So, it is a pretty ignorant and defeatist article.

A better thing:
    http://www.islandone.org/MMSG/aasm/

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

See also my own comments here on putting together knowledge about self-replicating infrastructre:
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/
http://www.pdfernhout.net/princeton-graduate-school-plans.html

Others:
http://www.islandone.org/MMSG/aasm/
http://lifeboat.com/ex/main

You might like this guy's writing starting from a charcoal furnance to make a machine shop from scrap:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_J._Gingery

"I get that you read a book..."

Wrote a (free, online) book, actually. :-)
        http://www.pdfernhout.net/post-scarcity-princeton.html
And other stuff, example:
    http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/AchievingAStarTrekSociety.html

But many others have said similar things before, from Albert Einstein to James P. Hogan. Although Einstein also said nuclear weapons did not create a new problem as much as make an old one much worse.

While I did repeat a general theme, it was JASON specific here. I actually sent a longer essay on this topic of abundance ideology to someone involved with JASON a couple of weeks ago, and developed that mythological issue in some detail. :-) No response to that... So I could not resist a chance to make that point here as summary, too, assuming JASON types or their associates/students might read this.

Are you saying this point on rethinking society so it works better for everyone and avoids self-destructive ironies does not relate to exactly the fundamental problem of technology allowing us to soon create an internet archive where anyone with a grudge can create a designer plague (given the spread of cheap DIY Bio)? The benefits and risks are presumably very different depending on what social structure exists around the archives. See also my suggestion here:
    "Getting to 100 social-technical points"
    http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/msg/a7abadb8867dae79

So, it seems to me you are taking some solutions off the table? Why are we willing to imagine that the advance of technology will soon produce a situation where a teenager can download a file from the internet, mess with it in their computer, print out something with a DNA sequencer, and wipe out the human race with a designer plague (same as teens make compuetr viruses), but then it is sci-fi, off-topic, or out of bounds to think we might actually upgrade our social technology to help teenagers and others not be so alienated or competitive or violence-prone? Many pre-scarcity cultures don't have as many alienated teens and young adults, so alternatives are possible.

Sure, there are a lot of complex things that need to be considered. But, we'll never get to the point of working out the details if we miss the big picture.

I'm not saying you don't have some valid points (and frankly I'd rather someone else put in the time to raise these issues). But as I see it, so much slashdot discussions these days are about adding technological epicycles on epicycles, and I'm trying to get people to consider a different model involving more fundamental conceptual change.

One thing I disagree with though -- we are not living in a post-scarcity society, though. The problem is we are living in a scarcity-paradigm society with post-scarcity capable technology -- sort of like handling blinding-power-level laser pointers to a room full of five year olds wound up on sugar and trained by their teachers to hate each other.

So, what are your alternative solutions?

It says somewhere on the CIA public website (or used to) essentially that if you are applying for a job there, you should not tell anyone. I guess, the first rule of the CIA is no one works there, except Valery Plame. :-) But the CIA suggests that in part for the reasons you imply, as it can presumably make people a target (although it also would complicated covert things). Of course, who is not a target in some way in this world? Things become an issue of "risk management", like so much in life. It's unfortunate that the US has such an organization that mixes up sensemaking, spying, and covert operations. I think a "COIA" (Central Open Intelligence Agency?) that just worked in public would be much more effective for US security. :-) Maybe to complement the "Department of Peace" Dennis Kucinich and others have worked towards? :-) Although various different agencies and parts of agencies all do part of that task, but there may be poor integration of all that. And, of course, nothing is going to work right as long as our economic religion is so messed up (and a top priority has to be rethinking economics for the 21st century so it stops being primarily a faith-based dogmatic religion that denies it is a religion. :-) Related:
"The Market as God"
http://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/issues/99mar/marketgod.htm

As to me and my funding, under our current socioeconomic paradigm, I'm right now mostly one step above Kryten as a toilet-scrubbing homeschooling stay-at-home Dad, supported by a wife doing data-analysis consulting for "civilian" corporations these days, where my hobbies include developing FOSS software, writing long essays like this that hardly anyone reads, taking care of three elderly chickens, and taking part in a global "Blessed Unrest" http://www.blessedunrest.com/ towards saving a world that, way more often than not, is uninterested in being saved from its own internal contradictions and ironies. A world going mad from simple things like vitamin D deficiency and not eating enough vegetables, fruits, and legumes:
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/mentalIllness.shtml
http://www.alternativeratreatments.com/eat-to-live.html

Best job I ever had. :-)

But if the CIA came along and offered me a big grant to do publicly available FOSS Intelligence software and related content, would I ask my wife to do even more of the homeschooling and chicken care than she does already, or maybe even hire a multilingual tutor for some of the time and/or buy a toilet scrubbing robot? Probably. :-) How's that for ethics? :-) Would I rather such work was funded some other way? Sure. We tried a bit and failed with the NSF and NASA:
http://www.gardenwithinsight.com/nsfprop.htm
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/

Maybe we did not try hard enough perhaps... I have to admire these Concord people for their success and doing stuff mostly the right way (at least, as right as you can be if focused mostly on the needs of compulsory schools):
http://www.concord.org/

Politics and FOSS can make strange bedfellows. A few years ago there was a slashdot story on someone doing FOSS who lost a military-related contract after he said he took military money because it meant one less cruise missile or something. But he was right in a way. Imagine what some FOSS developers could do with the time otherwise made available by the money tied up in just one Tomahawk cruise missile (US$6

NASA could coordinate a global effort towards designing and deploying self-Replicating Space Habitats that can duplicate themselves from sunlight and asteroidal ore; ideas towards that here by me:
    http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/SSI_Fernhout2001_web.html
    http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/
    http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=62113&cid=5821178
and others who inspired me:
    http://www.islandone.org/MMSG/aasm/
    http://www.webscription.net/chapters/0671878484/0671878484.htm
    http://www.cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/Bernal/world/

From the last, written in the 1920s by J.D. Bernal: "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. The initial stages of construction are the most difficult to imagine. They will probably consist of attaching an asteroid of some hundred years or so diameter to a space vessel, hollowing it out and using the removed material to build the first protective shell. Afterwards the shell could be re-worked, bit by bit, using elaborated and more suitable substances and at the same time increasing its size by diminishing its thickness. The globe would fulfil all the functions by which our earth manages to support life. In default of a gravitational field it has, perforce, to keep its atmosphere and the greater portion of its life inside; but as all its nourishment comes in the form of energy through its outer surface it would be forced to resemble on the whole an enormously complicated single-celled plant."

Anyway, I work towards that dream on-and-off as I can...

NASA could coordinate a global effort towards designing and deploying self-Replicating Space Habitats that can duplicate themselves from sunlight and asteroidal ore; ideas towards that here by me:
    http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/SSI_Fernhout2001_web.html
    http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/
    http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=62113&cid=5821178
and others who inspired me:
    http://www.islandone.org/MMSG/aasm/
    http://www.webscription.net/chapters/0671878484/0671878484.htm
    http://www.cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/Bernal/world/

From the last, written in the 1920s by J.D. Bernal: "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. The initial stages of construction are the most difficult to imagine. They will probably consist of attaching an asteroid of some hundred years or so diameter to a space vessel, hollowing it out and using the removed material to build the first protective shell. Afterwards the shell could be re-worked, bit by bit, using elaborated and more suitable substances and at the same time increasing its size by diminishing its thickness. The globe would fulfil all the functions by which our earth manages to support life. In default of a gravitational field it has, perforce, to keep its atmosphere and the greater portion of its life inside; but as all its nourishment comes in the form of energy through its outer surface it would be forced to resemble on the whole an enormously complicated single-celled plant."

Anyway, I work towards that dream on-and-off as I can...

Here is more on this issue of the global distribution of free and open source software to all the countries of the world, even ones now deemed "competitors" or "unfriendly".

When I was an undegraduate psychology major at Princeton University, my advisor was George A. Miller. This was in the early-to-mid 1980s just before he started working on WordNet -- which was funded in large part by three letter agencies after George "retired". WordNet is also an "open source" project to which, in my less humble moments, I like to think I played a little role in sparking with my own crude explorations on semantic networks as a student of his, as discussed here:
http://groups.google.com/group/openvirgle/msg/231e63e966e932df?hl=en

WordNet, being open source, is no doubt used by governments around the world, including in China or maybe even North Korea. WordNet is also at the core of much of Google's AdSense profit making (not that I ever saw a dime from that. :-)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Armitage_Miller
But, what I have seen from that is being able to use Google -- a great service run on essentially a global supercomputer that has let me create all sorts of essays about ways forward for our society, such as:
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/AchievingAStarTrekSociety.html
http://www.pdfernhout.net/post-scarcity-princeton.html
http://knol.google.com/k/paul-d-fernhout/beyond-a-jobless-recovery
So, I and many others have greatly benefited from the open source nature of WordNet and what that made possible, far more than if I or George or someone else had a bunch of money in the bank from some proprietary semantic network system that otherwise had sat on the shelf.

George never talked politics with me -- maybe as a consequence of always being pestered by other people to tell of his days working alongside Noam Chomsky (like working on joint papers, etc.). :-) The only time he said anything remotely political in my presence that I can recall was, in the days after "The Day After" movie (a PU prof had helped with the special effects) in the corridor near his office outside the men's bathroom in Green Hall. He seemed a bit upset or angry, IIRC another faculty member was there that he might have been talking to about this, and he said how stupid it was that the first thing the US or USSR military planned to do in a military confrontation was blind the other's satellites, which essentially would ensure the conflict would escalate, because there would be no way the other side could tell what was going on, and they would probably just assume the worst and shoot off all their missiles. I think he may have just read a newspaper article about that.

I feel George has made the world a much better place by creating WordNet -- and a world less likely to shoot off all its nuclear missiles. Whatever the sparks behind WordNet which he started at around age 65 (and I'm sure there were many sparks, as he hung out with lots of people doing semantic network stuff, like Alan Newell and Herbert Simon), he put in year after year of hard work, and structured it based on years of his research into how humans understand language and also how dictionaries work (or should work). He made something open source back when hardly anyone was doing that (and I myself was more interested in proprietary things and being the next, well, Bill Gates was not that big then, but whoever was ultrarich with a big company etc.). As a measure of my own personal growth from those times, in part from George's example, here is a recent video I ma

On whether the simulation argument is like creationism, well, science can't really prove or disprove stuff about what caused first causes or by definition access any context outside a virtual server and firewall (if such exist), since science requires experiment, prediction, repeatability, accessibility, and so on. Access to those mysteries outside a simulated sandbox we might live in would probably be precluded by a well-written virtual machine (unless we found the debugging hooks? :-) Although who knows at what point someone might network our server to others? :-) Maybe when we "discover" other civilizations around other stars? :-) We also have to accept that everything like the fossil record could be faked (or at least just evolved once and then put in place billions of times from backup copies, same as you or I might provision a billion Virtual Servers in a cloud all from a standard GNU/Linux distribution configured once). And I say that as someone who was in a PhD program in Ecology and Evolution for a time. :-) Although with that said, about accepting the possibility of a God who is into fakery, it doesn't get us very far to pretend evolution does not happen given we can see it happening every year with various diseases evolving, so it's not really that useful a mental construct to think that a God exists who is intentionally misleading (or cruel) in that way (whether it is true or not). Evolution is a really useful idea in science and design and prediction, so it makes sense to work from that basis, given all the evidence (although there remain the mysteries of consciousness itself, identity, and a host of other related issues). Besides, with lots of CPU, it might just be easier to grow everything from scratch (a big bang?) each time anyway, maybe just altering seeds or constants a little here and there, sort of like booting up a GNU/Linux box; so on a practical basis, evolution might be a reality in each simulation essentially from a big bang.

We do something like that with growing plants from a seed in our PlantStudio software -- each time you grow it, we regrow it from scratch using a seed number for the random number generator that translates into a specific branching pattern for the plant that goes repeatedly with that random number seed and other parameters you have chosen.
    http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/PlantStudio/

One alternative to thinking we are living in a "simulation" is a "many worlds" quantum viewpoint, but maybe they are essentially the same in implications anyway? :-)
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Many-worlds_interpretation

The recently late :-( James P. Hogan wrote about these kinds of ideas -- both life in a simulation (in Entoverse), and many worlds interpretations in his other works (Star Child, Paths to Otherwhere, etc.).
    http://www.jamesphogan.com/
I hope his spirit (if such exists) is onto better things (if they exist, either in otherwheres, other virtual machines, or other planes of reality, or something beyond our imagining).

Thanks for trying it. I appreciate any frank feedback. I agree it could be improved (we did make the source available under the GPL -- there is a lot under the hood, like the various models). We ran out of funds to continue it and had to take jobs at IBM to pay back money we had borrowed for living expenses to develop it (and that killed any momentum we had on it). As two middle class people, my wife and I poured more than six person years of our time into that to try to help kids have some better educational tools (back when people were still questioning why there were few non-violent simulations out there or stuff girls might like or even organic agriculture or environmentalism). There is a lot more to that program for teenagers and adults when you get into it (too much, really), and remember, this was written about fifteen years ago. I could do way better now. It was mainly just too ambitious -- it does all sorts of scientific-related things moving through three levels of increasing abstract representation (direct manipulation, inspecting, graphing). It's much more a simulator (microworld, see Papert) than a game (there is no score etc..)

PlantStudio is another program that came out of that approach, that also should run under Wine, and is a step forward in interface (for the time), and many people have liked, though again it is dated.
    http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/PlantStudio/
Downloadable here:
    http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/download_new.html
Between the two, PlantStudio, which uses the same basic algorithms but with a simpler interface focused on just one thing, generated much more excitement (but we were unable to follow it up much as we were busy working at IBM). Examples of user comments from back then:
    http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/PlantStudio/userssay.htm
"An excellent example of educational expertise.... It is an excellent adjunct for general modeling, especially in the creation of scenes."

So, we were learning. But it got cut off because, back then, it was hard to get any funders to see the value of educational computer simulations (especially ones that were open source). That's what's great about NASA finally putting money into these sorts of things.

I have Java ports of both those partially complete (don't know if they will ever be finished, because, as you suggest, the GUI could be improved, which makes a straight port kind of pointless, but means more work to redesign it).

By the way, on good parenting and education without too much "grounding" or "bribes" or very much forcing kids to learn stuff they don't want to study right then: :-)
http://www.holtgws.com/whatisunschoolin.html
http://www.alfiekohn.org/books/pbr.htm
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/toc1.htm

Thanks for trying it. I appreciate any frank feedback. I agree it could be improved (we did make the source available under the GPL -- there is a lot under the hood, like the various models). We ran out of funds to continue it and had to take jobs at IBM to pay back money we had borrowed for living expenses to develop it (and that killed any momentum we had on it). As two middle class people, my wife and I poured more than six person years of our time into that to try to help kids have some better educational tools (back when people were still questioning why there were few non-violent simulations out there or stuff girls might like or even organic agriculture or environmentalism). There is a lot more to that program for teenagers and adults when you get into it (too much, really), and remember, this was written about fifteen years ago. I could do way better now. It was mainly just too ambitious -- it does all sorts of scientific-related things moving through three levels of increasing abstract representation (direct manipulation, inspecting, graphing). It's much more a simulator (microworld, see Papert) than a game (there is no score etc..)

PlantStudio is another program that came out of that approach, that also should run under Wine, and is a step forward in interface (for the time), and many people have liked, though again it is dated.
    http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/PlantStudio/
Downloadable here:
    http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/download_new.html
Between the two, PlantStudio, which uses the same basic algorithms but with a simpler interface focused on just one thing, generated much more excitement (but we were unable to follow it up much as we were busy working at IBM). Examples of user comments from back then:
    http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/PlantStudio/userssay.htm
"An excellent example of educational expertise.... It is an excellent adjunct for general modeling, especially in the creation of scenes."

So, we were learning. But it got cut off because, back then, it was hard to get any funders to see the value of educational computer simulations (especially ones that were open source). That's what's great about NASA finally putting money into these sorts of things.

I have Java ports of both those partially complete (don't know if they will ever be finished, because, as you suggest, the GUI could be improved, which makes a straight port kind of pointless, but means more work to redesign it).

By the way, on good parenting and education without too much "grounding" or "bribes" or very much forcing kids to learn stuff they don't want to study right then: :-)
http://www.holtgws.com/whatisunschoolin.html
http://www.alfiekohn.org/books/pbr.htm
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/toc1.htm

Thanks for trying it. I appreciate any frank feedback. I agree it could be improved (we did make the source available under the GPL -- there is a lot under the hood, like the various models). We ran out of funds to continue it and had to take jobs at IBM to pay back money we had borrowed for living expenses to develop it (and that killed any momentum we had on it). As two middle class people, my wife and I poured more than six person years of our time into that to try to help kids have some better educational tools (back when people were still questioning why there were few non-violent simulations out there or stuff girls might like or even organic agriculture or environmentalism). There is a lot more to that program for teenagers and adults when you get into it (too much, really), and remember, this was written about fifteen years ago. I could do way better now. It was mainly just too ambitious -- it does all sorts of scientific-related things moving through three levels of increasing abstract representation (direct manipulation, inspecting, graphing). It's much more a simulator (microworld, see Papert) than a game (there is no score etc..)

PlantStudio is another program that came out of that approach, that also should run under Wine, and is a step forward in interface (for the time), and many people have liked, though again it is dated.
    http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/PlantStudio/
Downloadable here:
    http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/download_new.html
Between the two, PlantStudio, which uses the same basic algorithms but with a simpler interface focused on just one thing, generated much more excitement (but we were unable to follow it up much as we were busy working at IBM). Examples of user comments from back then:
    http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/PlantStudio/userssay.htm
"An excellent example of educational expertise.... It is an excellent adjunct for general modeling, especially in the creation of scenes."

So, we were learning. But it got cut off because, back then, it was hard to get any funders to see the value of educational computer simulations (especially ones that were open source). That's what's great about NASA finally putting money into these sorts of things.

I have Java ports of both those partially complete (don't know if they will ever be finished, because, as you suggest, the GUI could be improved, which makes a straight port kind of pointless, but means more work to redesign it).

By the way, on good parenting and education without too much "grounding" or "bribes" or very much forcing kids to learn stuff they don't want to study right then: :-)
http://www.holtgws.com/whatisunschoolin.html
http://www.alfiekohn.org/books/pbr.htm
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/toc1.htm

Thanks. Well, I guess, as you predicted, others don't agree, and the first item has been modded down to (0, Troll).
http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1571756&cid=31365414
So has another gone down as offtopic:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1571756&cid=31365538
And another market Troll:
http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1571756&cid=31366202
How citing a book by acknowledged experts on the interrelation of child development and violent media and toys is off-topic and trolling in the context of discussing banning violent videogames and toys, well, I guess that happens sometimes. :-) Some people don't want to know (granted I say other stuff people may not like, too).

As a stay-at-home Dad (to some extent, and homeschooling) and also technology person, I've spent a lot of time thinking on this stuff, reading about it, and writing on it, (as in, years), so I have all the links etc. ready to go.

More by me on options for social progress (or regression) could be found here:
"Jobless Recovery"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jobless_recovery
"[p2p-research] Rebutting Communiqué from an Absent Future (was Re: Information on student protests)"
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-November/006005.html
"Post-Scarcity Princeton"
http://www.pdfernhout.net/post-scarcity-princeton.html
"Achieving a Star Trek Society"
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/AchievingAStarTrekSociety.html
"A brickfilm movie idea about preventing a Caprican future"
http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/msg/cac4e38a9b68d083

As I say elsewhere, I don't think censorship is the answer to this sort of problem. Actually, I also think Chavez has the problem wrong. Violence and addictive-seeming consumption of social media happens in large part due to social stress:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rat_Park
The key is to reduce the stress, and to direct people to more positive activities.

As Bucky Fuller said:
http://challenge.bfi.org/movie
"You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete."

That's really what Chavez is doing wrong with this, and some other things. It's sad. Venezuela could repeal the Berne convention on copyrights, institute a basic income, expand the public library system instead of the public school system, grind up rock for fertilizer, promote cooperative games, and a variety of other more essential and effective things to create prosperity for all there. Banning the violent video games does not address any of these core issues.

Twenty years from now, when renewables replace oil (a major revenue for Venezuela) through exponential growth, and AI and robotics and better design (a better RepRap) can produce really cheap products in any industrialized country (and so they will flood in from abroad), Venezuela will be in bad shape unless it has transitioned beyond capitalist economics entirely

Much hardware design starts in simulation, which is essentially software.

As the OpenVirgle page says, most of that activity has moved to the "open manufacturing" idea, where there is more current activity towards that sort of "clanking" thing, but in a more general way:
http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing

Artemis had always struck me as focusing on proprietary things, so is a non-starter in that sense (unless they have changed recently). I prefer what LUF is up to, like with what Eric Hunting is up to with "The Millennial Project 2":
http://tmp2.wikia.com/
http://theluf.blogspot.com/

And then there is the newer "OpenLuna":
http://www.openluna.org/

Twenty years before that I tried to do a PhD in this at Princeton (which fizzled painfully, after a similar attempt fizzled even more quickly essentially before it started at NCSU):
http://www.pdfernhout.net/princeton-graduate-school-plans.html
"I'm posting this stuff here for archival purposes and in case they give others some ideas or encouragement for their own efforts. It's part of my scanning my own old paper archives. This was my proposal for graduate studies at Princeton University twenty years ago (and in some ways includes a proposal for creating a mini-Google and a mini-World-Wide-Web. :-). ... The good news is that now, twenty years later, all or most of the hurdles have fallen that otherwise needed leaping before being able to comprehensively design self-replicating space habitats, and all the computer and informational resources I thought I needed then are now available for cheap or free. For example, for only a few thousand dollars, I have the equivalent of an early 1990s supercomputer in my office with terabytes of storage and a high speed color scanner and a network connection and access to Google and Wikipedia and so on. So, what I outlined in the 20th century is more and more doable in the 21st century for less and less cost. So, item 13 (the major goal) is now approachable without needing to do much on the other prerequisite items listed. ..."

And then I worked toward a non-profit and then a company that both also fizzled:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/sunrise-sustainable-technology-ventures.html

I did get a masters as a consolation prize from an Ecology and Evolution PhD program when later my PhD studies towards this end at SUNY SB also fizzled...

Anyway, I tried to get NASA interested in this stuff over a decade ago but I was not successful; my attempt there:
"Open Source Community on Manufacturing Knowledge"
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/prototype.htm

This is not to blame NASA entirely, other than being kind of bureaucratic like most government agencies, and I'm not that great a promoter. As is pointed out in many places, including by someone here:
http://www.freesoftwaremagazine.com/articles/free_matter_economy?page=0%2C1
the general problem with grants and things is that almost invariably the people best at getting grants are often the people least likely to do much innovative stuff with the money. :-) That is, grant getting skills and product creation skills are rarely found in the same person, or even in the same organization. And in this case of OSCOMAK, it also went against the very idea of tight managerial control that is a hallmark of NASA. But, could I ha