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Strange Places To Find Open Source
itwbennett writes "Open source is about more than code: It's also about tractors, prosthetics, Christmas lights, and the poor old U.S. Postal Service. If you don't believe that open source changes everything, take a gander at Marcin Jakubowski's Global Village Construction Set (GVCS), a set of 50 industrial machines that are required to build and maintain a small, sustainable civilization. The open source aspect covers designs, instructions, schematics, budgets — everything anyone needs to know to build their own machines, and it is all freely available and free to share."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martial_arts There you go. Pretty much all of those are open. User developed, user maintained, user taught.
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
While the OSDK might not exist, the dynamic duo of AK-47-and-offspring and RPG-7-and-descendants are arguably the equivalent of the MP3 format: Originally proprietary, and not really all that fantastic compared to some of the competition; but cheap, ubiquitous, and widely cloned...
Ninjas vs Warlords. Hollywood has probably already stolen the idea.
Seriously though. GVCS takes an interesting approach of building a society. There needs to be some thought behind defending what is created. Take the situations in Mexico and Somalia for examples. Instead of captive populations or towns just hunkering down in scattered huts and praying the tiger comes for your neighbor instead, what designs for communities could successfully defend against warlords/gangs? Would fort designs from the Brits' and US history be updated and prove practical?
Clearly non violent movements won't and can't work in those environments while the populace is scattered and unorganized. Rocks and martial arts are individual defense ideas, not community defense. (I do have a cynic's humor though, so no whoosh here you bastards...)
I like how the GVCS has all these computer controlled tools.... and nowhere in the list is a computer.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
It's a hippie version of a bulldozer. PS: I have a D6, a D7 a loader and a grader at my farm - my little "Tonka" toys :P
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
variety of foods (you can't grow everything in one climate/soil)
With a suitable greenhouse in a moderate climate you can come very very close. And soil is not as important as you might think. You're not going to be growing fine wines everywhere, of course, but that's not the goal.
I don't think anyone on that team has done any serious math as far as energy requirements of something as simple as smelting aluminum.
The energy requirements are high, true. But the power requirements are only a function of scale. The difference between retail feasibility and industrial profitability is close to an order of magnitude. So you can scale down a lot and have it still make sense. And aluminum is easy enough to source and transport and recycle once you have it so I don't think that's a huge issue.
Do you employ people to hand-disassemble everything into it's tiniest material components?
I don't see why not. There are billions of unemployed people on the planet. Goods that are designed for it can be very easy to recycle.
To be honest, after reading much of the website, I couldn't help but think that simply eschewing all of the technology and "going back to the earth" would be a lot easier.
Perhaps. But there is a lot of technology involved in that as well. On the website you see that there are plans for permaculture and aquaponics. It just takes longer to establish and is fairly labor and resource intensive to maintain so it's not going to happen overnight.
Given resource limits versus the Earth's current population, it may not happen ever. If industrial farming currently supports 2 people per acre, and permaculture requires 2 acres per person, then we must find middle ground.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
From way back in April.
-deane
You can watch Marcin's TED speech to get an idea of his motivations and experience: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zIsHKrP-66s
But the short answer is, yes, he is building and testing some of them at least. And the point is that it doesn't need to be "industrial scale".
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
No other metals/materials, no glass, no plastics,
They do have a machine for making plastics, and there is nothing wrong with using wood in a sustainable culture, if you do so at a replaceable rate.
And there is no plan for how to construct that construction kit in the first place.
There doesn't need to be. The goal isn't to bootstrap civilization after it has collapsed. It is to find the smallest set of machines needed to recreate themselves, and thus allow civilization at say 1930's level to be maintained in as small of economy as possible.
Several vendors sell multipurpose Lathe-Mill-Drill 3-in-1 machines.
Tech Public Policy stuff
Oh look, here's a 50 kW electric-arc furnace capable of smelting steel. I imagine that would work well with a 50 kW windmill...
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
There's a classic "Build a Complete Metalworking Shop from Scrap" set of books. This set of books really does describe how to build machine tools starting from scrap and hand tools. The author was originally thinking of recovery after a nuclear war, when there would be plenty of scrap around.
Roman life expectancy had little to do with their medicine. They had a cultural practice of infant exposure. They would kill unhealthy (born) children. Naturally this affected the statistics for life expectancy at birth. Roman life expectancy at age 5 was 48, higher than almost anywhere else at the time. It was deliberate. And it produced the most dominant military force the world has ever seen.
They also had a cultural practice of cutting unborn children from mothers who died in childbirth. This produced people with unnaturally large heads. Again, deliberate. And today known as Caesarian section. Roman surgeons were excellent, as a result of, again, warfare.
In short, Romans were the world's preeminent genetic engineers. They probably affected your life expectancy for the better, and may even be responsible for you being able to type on magic computing boxes to people halfway around the globe right now.
In fact, I would go so far as to say that your entire premise is complete nonsense, and that given adequate resources and moderately high standard of living, the vast majority of people would tend to live long and healthy lives even without modern medicine.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"