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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Well, the delays to updating the site might have something to do with the fact that the web-master is currently operating out of the Sahara desert in Morocco (go to the bottom of the page).

For this reason, I would say the only way the public would actually accept "public" photograph data as real deal, is if NASA "open-sourced" spacecraft broadcasting interface - frequencies, protocol, encoding, where to set up a dish, size of dish required - so that whoever actually doubts the authencity of such photos, may instead doubt whether NASA is faking a signal from the Moon that carries digital image data. After all, if the information is pubic, it is public. Nothing in the transmission is really secret or falls under NDA anyway? It involves radio waves, some archaic encoding scheme of some color channels and a wrapping protocol for transmission. The open-sourcing of the transmission would force the hoax game onto a whole new level of complexity, where it would not be so easy for the skeptics to cry fake.

As "rlseaman" said, OpenSource isn't the right term, I would say open protocols and standards, with all data sent in the clear. (You'd have to keep a secured control channel though.)

Which is exactly what http://www.openluna.org/wiki/index.php/Mission_Plan intends to do, Send back every bit of data open and clear. The world's paying for it, the world should have the data.

http://www.openluna.org/wiki/index.php/People_needed Announce what you can do, then dig in and start doing it...

Oh, and you have to believe we can go and have gone, because most of our present condition data requires that... (Unless you like one way trips to the unknown.)

That is what http://openluna.org/ is all about, getting the teeming thousands who are qualified (and some times the teeming millions who aren't) to get up off their armchairs and actually do something about it. Yes, I know we could build a better rover that the NASA folks. They are over-bloated, and all of that bloat sucks up the little budget they have, have an insane command structure that stifles innovation - they even recently did a video about it, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_424YskAfew .

I know many people that work for NASA, some as Civil servants (The "Real" NASA employees), some as contractors, some as administration, I even met Michael Griffin once, and almost everyone of them complained about the stifling bureaucracy that they are forced to work under. (Griffin included!) Most of them work hard, and really believe in the mission, but the bureaucracy has grown to unbearable and irreparable points. The culture of innovation is gone. "Failure is not an option" still exists, but in a way that stifles innovation. It is now all about the fulfilling the Party Line.

So, here is the call to action for all of you Armchair (and professional) Engineers - Stop complaining and DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT.

Artists, Engineers, Movie makers, Writers, investors, Marketing, EPO, PR, and even Lawyers, Get in and help us. We will put bootprints on the Lunar regolith, and do so at a small fraction of any NASA budget, and it will work.

All we need is a little help. http://openluna.org/wiki

That is what http://openluna.org/ is all about, getting the teeming thousands who are qualified (and some times the teeming millions who aren't) to get up off their armchairs and actually do something about it. Yes, I know we could build a better rover that the NASA folks. They are over-bloated, and all of that bloat sucks up the little budget they have, have an insane command structure that stifles innovation - they even recently did a video about it, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_424YskAfew .

I know many people that work for NASA, some as Civil servants (The "Real" NASA employees), some as contractors, some as administration, I even met Michael Griffin once, and almost everyone of them complained about the stifling bureaucracy that they are forced to work under. (Griffin included!) Most of them work hard, and really believe in the mission, but the bureaucracy has grown to unbearable and irreparable points. The culture of innovation is gone. "Failure is not an option" still exists, but in a way that stifles innovation. It is now all about the fulfilling the Party Line.

So, here is the call to action for all of you Armchair (and professional) Engineers - Stop complaining and DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT.

Artists, Engineers, Movie makers, Writers, investors, Marketing, EPO, PR, and even Lawyers, Get in and help us. We will put bootprints on the Lunar regolith, and do so at a small fraction of any NASA budget, and it will work.

All we need is a little help. http://openluna.org/wiki

Then I very probably led that mission, or was personally involved in it's support! Cool!

It is an awesome experience, and a lot of very good work is done there. We learn a great deal about field methodologies, consumables requirements, space utilization, I could go on for hours.

There is a great deal to be learned from analog operations, and they do not require near vacuums nor 1/3G...

It is a great project, but I have left it (PHB issues...) and have moved on to http://openluna.org/ where I build real suits and a real outpost. We will be testing these in an analog environment before launching...

http://openluna.org/ is always looking for tech savvy people to help with their projects. And, as you can see, they need a web developer in a big way. They are also working on several projects that would benefit from technical experience. (Or even non-technical help) They need people who can work in embedded systems, long range communications, machinists, welders, fund raisers, marketing folks, artists. About any useful skill and you can probably help....

Plus, you get to help mankind get back to the moon, and in a more realistic time frame and cost rather than insanely long and expensive plan that the NASA bloatocracy is trying to work...

How about on one of the new private moon landers? OpenLuna plans to do it. http://openluna.org/wiki/index.php/Scout_class

Yes, Yes we are. Along with the first lander we intend to include a very small very low power web/mail/dns/tracker/etc server into it. First net presence on the surface.
You might also look at http://openluna.org/wiki/index.php/Mission_Plan or
http://openluna.org/wiki/index.php/People_needed (Shameless plug)

How about on one of the new private moon landers? OpenLuna plans to do it. http://openluna.org/wiki/index.php/Scout_class

Yes, Yes we are. Along with the first lander we intend to include a very small very low power web/mail/dns/tracker/etc server into it. First net presence on the surface.
You might also look at http://openluna.org/wiki/index.php/Mission_Plan or
http://openluna.org/wiki/index.php/People_needed (Shameless plug)

How about on one of the new private moon landers? OpenLuna plans to do it. http://openluna.org/wiki/index.php/Scout_class

Yes, Yes we are. Along with the first lander we intend to include a very small very low power web/mail/dns/tracker/etc server into it. First net presence on the surface.
You might also look at http://openluna.org/wiki/index.php/Mission_Plan or
http://openluna.org/wiki/index.php/People_needed (Shameless plug)