The Survival Machine Farm

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Posted by samzenpus on Monday November 5, 2012 @06:20AM from the zombie-machines dept.

pacopico writes "There's a 30-acre plot of land in Maysville, MO where about two dozen people have gathered to build a Civilization Starter Kit. As Businessweek reports, they're working on open-source versions of bulldozers, bread ovens, saws and other tools right on up to robots and chip fabs. The project has been dubbed the Factor e Farm, and it's run by a former nuclear physicist and a bunch of volunteers. The end goal is to have people modify the tool designs until they're good enough to compete with commercial equipment."

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Ah... Yeah... by Frosty+Piss · 2012-11-05 06:21 · Score: 5, Funny

wskiâ(TM)s hut anchors a 30-acre compound near Maysville, Mo., full of wooden shacks, yurts, work sheds, flapping laundry, clucking chickens, and a collection of black and strange-looking machinery. A dozen or so people in their twenties, none of whom appears to have bathed in a while, wander around or fiddle with the machines."
I'm not sure these people are queued for success...

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1. Re:Ah... Yeah... by Millennium · 2012-11-05 06:33 · Score: 4, Insightful
  
  Perhaps not, but the idea of an archive from which the survivors of a disaster could start to rebuild is intriguing. I'd tend to focus more in information than objects, mostly because I believe it would be easier to ensure that the information survives in a usable state, but objects do have the advantage of allowing you to test your specifications.
2. Re:Ah... Yeah... by ColdWetDog · 2012-11-05 06:36 · Score: 5, Interesting
  
  Really. While these folks are struggling re inventing technology, I'm gonna grab the D4 sitting in the rental store yard, trundle over to a diesel tank, steal that and drag the whole thing down the road to my house. All the while taking potshots at people who are similarly inclined with my semi automatic rifle and the 10,000 rounds of ammo I found in the neighbor's house.
  Then I'm gonna head down to these guys and steal their chickens.
  Come on. If the apocalypse happens there is going to be so much techno crap strewn over the landscape that you will want to bury it at some point. Once you have stabilized your situation with appropriate amounts of defensive gear, food, water and communications you will have a treasure trove of stuff to pick from once the buzzards pick the bodies clean.
  In the mean while, I'm going to sleep on a nice bed and take regular showers. Easier to get laid that way.
  
  --
  Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
3. Re:Ah... Yeah... by JWW · 2012-11-05 06:39 · Score: 4, Funny
  
  When you said archive for survivors, this concept for a post-apocalyptic movie just popped into my head.
  In 2275 on a wasteland Earth, survivors seek the fabled temple of Google, rumored to contain all the knowledge of mankind before the great cataclysm....
4. Re:Ah... Yeah... by wisnoskij · 2012-11-05 06:44 · Score: 2
  
  That already exists. If humans survive, machines will survive to be reverse engineered. And they will not be theoretical OS machines , but mass produced tried and tested machines which become OS as soon as civilization collapses.
  
  --
  Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
5. Re:Ah... Yeah... by Culture20 · 2012-11-05 06:52 · Score: 2
  
  Look! A field full of iron doohickeys! We're rich! Let's build a blacksmith shop right here so we can turn these sculptures into something useful like plows.
6. Re:Ah... Yeah... by tgd · 2012-11-05 07:10 · Score: 3, Insightful
  
  Perhaps not, but the idea of an archive from which the survivors of a disaster could start to rebuild is intriguing. I'd tend to focus more in information than objects, mostly because I believe it would be easier to ensure that the information survives in a usable state, but objects do have the advantage of allowing you to test your specifications.
  Neither are actually really of much use. There's too much interconnected technology these days. Behind any one little thing there's a chain of a hundred other technologies (or entire industries) supporting it. And underlying almost all of it is "available energy". There are very few viable energy sources a group of "survivors" could tap if they truly had to bootstrap a technical society again. The fuel sources that powered industrialization (coal, whale oil, eventually petroleum) are all largely non-recoverable anymore without infrastructure built up over time using those same energy sources.
  A bulldozer won't help you do much -- you need steel to make more. That takes electricity or coal. To get electricity, you need (in its simplest form, something like hydro) bulldozers. To get coal, you need them, too. And to build them you need steel -- and fuel to power them. To get that fuel, you need drilling equipment. See where this goes?
  If you really wanted to help "survivors" you need to enormously reduce the industrial and energy requirements of manufacturing your manufacturing equipment. The industrial revolution was very likely a one-time event in history, at this point.
7. Re:Ah... Yeah... by RMingin · 2012-11-05 07:14 · Score: 5, Funny
  
  Go play Fallout 1. Been done. We called it a GECK there.
  
  --
  The preceding comment is my own, and in no way construes an opinon of the Emperor of Mankind.
8. Re:Ah... Yeah... by ArhcAngel · 2012-11-05 07:29 · Score: 4, Funny
  
  If cockroaches survived the last apocalypse then I suspect patent trolls will survive this one.
  
  --
  "A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
9. Re:Ah... Yeah... by Penguinisto · 2012-11-05 07:31 · Score: 2
  
  Unfortunately, we can't all sit in a drum circle, hold hands, and sing "kumbaya."
  Unless you're capable of defending yourself, you'll end up slaves to the first civilization to come along with superior firepower. See also Rome.
  
  --
  Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
10. Re:Ah... Yeah... by LMariachi · 2012-11-05 07:39 · Score: 3, Informative
  
  That was Fallout 2. The Macguffin in the first one was the water chip.
11. Re:Ah... Yeah... by Shoten · 2012-11-05 07:52 · Score: 4, Insightful
  
  You can't quite reverse engineer machinery with your bare hands. Sure, you can take the thing apart (for the most part) and examine how the parts are shaped and how they fit together. But the metallurgy alone is a whooole other ball game.
  Here's an example: my espresso machine. Yes, I know, it's not a farm combine, but work with me for a second. It's stainless steel, but if you look carefully at it, you'll see that the body of the machine is a different color metal than the tray at the bottom. And there's a reason for this: the steel of those two sections, while both considered "stainless steel," are different alloys. Why is this? Well, I happen to know that it's for reasons of ductility with regard to the body of the machine, and of stiffness for the tray. But what I don't know is the exact composition of those alloys. I also don't know how to make the dies that produced either component, how to smelt the raw metals that went into the alloys, and so on...
  Now, that was just the outside body of a relatively simple device with relatively minimal demands with regards to physical strain or usage. Just a household espresso machine. Take that a step further, onto a device that has waaaaay more moving parts, exerts far more force, and must also be weatherproof. Something that will be exposed to grit, dust, moisture, mud, snow, and rain. Something with hydraulics (good luck reverse-engineering the fluid, by the way) and an internal combustion engine, and an electrical system. Try reverse engineering the metal of the cogs and bearings, the plastic/neoprene of the seals, the wires, the chips inside the microprocessors. And then try to imagine how to build them all.
  I'd hang out with the Amish, and cast my lot with them...
  
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12. Re:Ah... Yeah... by tgd · 2012-11-05 08:14 · Score: 2
  
  Obviously you can't go straight back to industrial levels. You would have to start with considerably lower-tech solutions and build up from there, not too different from how it worked the first time around. The object is to make it faster (without the overhead of rediscovery from scratch), not to make it instantaneous.
  The first time around, you could mine coal with hand tools. Oil was found near the surface, and could be drilled with primitive equipment. Before that there were massive old growth forests of dense wood that could be felled for fuel. None of that is true anymore. We've used up all of the easy to acquire resources. You need to dig deep for metals, you need to dig deep for coal. You need to drill deep for oil.
  Its optimistic to think its even possible to bootstrap anymore. There may be very limited sources of all the required resources available, but they're geographically diverse and (more importantly) not politically aligned. Western industrialization happened via effectively strip-mining all accessible resources, and iteratively applying the results of those increases in modernization to make additional resources available.
13. Re:Ah... Yeah... by jdray · 2012-11-05 08:31 · Score: 4, Insightful
  
  That may be so, but his focus is all off. I mean, he's working on a plasma cutter, but he hasn't got centralized waste treatment down. His list of "essential tools for a modern society" includes a 3-D scanner. While it may be very useful for quickly developing models of already-existing artifacts that you need to do a clean-lab reproduction of, it's a long-tail need. Arguably, someone with a set of calipers and a sketchpad should be able to produce a workable set of engineering drawings sufficient to build most things that you could accurately scan with a hand-made 3D scanner. It's folly, like much of what they're pursuing.
  Having said all this, I laud the core idea of what they say they'd like to achieve. However, more analysis needs to be put into their plan; more requirements gathering and architecture is needed. For instance, they have their vaunted "power cube". If you read the documentation on their site, they're all excited that future power cubes could have electric motors at their core instead of ICEs, and other power cubes have hydraulic pumps in them. What they fail to realize is that they have two different types of object here: one that generates mechanical energy from some sort of fuel (lumping electricity in with "fuel", which I realize is a stretch here on Slashdot; please keep reading), the other that translates that mechanical energy into a different format. If they had fuel-to-energy cubes (gas or diesel or methane or whatever converted to rotating mechanical), then energy-to-energy cubes (rotating mechanical to one of linear mechanical, hydraulic, or electric), and finally a rotating mechanical-to-electric generator, these objects could be combined in a variety of assemblies to produce what they need.
  And it's really not clear to me what they consider "modern society" that they're trying to reproduce. To me, any sort of development since about the Industrial Revolution has been essentially a refinement of capability, including machine-based calculation (thank you Mr. Babbage). Sure, if you want to build computers using silicon instead of tubes, that's much better. But our society and level of comfort could be no worse, and arguably better, if technology never got significantly better than we had a hundred years ago. How many of the trappings of modern society do we really need, and how many just make us more comfortable? How many things did we have a hundred years ago that we could re-implement with the benefit of hindsight and have a much better life than we have today?
  
  --
  The Spoon
  Updated 6/28/2011
14. Re:Ah... Yeah... by MozeeToby · 2012-11-05 08:57 · Score: 2
  
  I think some people are missing the point about their design's being open source. The idea is for these machines to be built and used in poor, developing nations today. This would prove that they can be built by relative laymen, can be repaired, and can compete with (much, much, much more expensive) commercially available options, not on a feature for feature basis, but on a cost and effort to reward basis. If you can get even a tiny bit of momentum going, maybe 100 farmers knocking together these machines in their machine sheds, you'll get said farmers coming back to you saying "this part was really difficult to get right during construction", "this was prone to breaking when hauling heavy loads", and - the holy grail - "you'd get better performance if you change this part to look more like this". You'd be amazed at the practical engineering knowledge a poor, desperate farmer has.
  Why is this better than reverse engineering John Deere's designs? Because a modern tractor is an enormously complex piece of machinery. Would one run without any integrated circuits? I doubt it. Without refined fuel? Doubtful too. How many individual parts go into building one? Thousands? Tens of thousands? Yes, there are simpler, older designs out there, some are even still in use (see the note about the ingenuity of poor and desperate farmers). But I'd rather take a machine that was designed from the ground up to be producible, maintainable and usable with the minimum of infrastructure than one that just happens to be less complicated because it's 80 years old.
  Not to mention all the other aspects that people are ignoring. One of their main points is synergy amongst the machines that they are designing. The same powerplant that is used to drive the bulldozer is also used as a hydraulic pump in their other machines, is also used as a generator, is also used as the power source for their aluminum smelter. They're trying to design a system of machines that a small, isolated group could conceivable build from the absolute bare minimum of available tools. And that is a very different problem than building the best tractor money can buy with all the resources of modern civilization.
15. Re:Ah... Yeah... by SB9876 · 2012-11-05 09:16 · Score: 4, Interesting
  
  The whole antibiotics thing that's post-industrial revolution was pretty nifty, IMO.
  I'll agree that they're a bit scattered in scope but they are doing interesting things. I've been following the group fora few years now and it seems that the overall aim is moving away from a 'rebuild civilization' kit towards open source, low-cost farm equipment for smaller farms and developing nations. There's a strong emphasis on low cost, modular design where the metalworking is all very simple. That alone is definitely worth the cost of admission.
16. Re:Ah... Yeah... by dj245 · 2012-11-05 10:27 · Score: 2
  
  How many of the trappings of modern society do we really need, and how many just make us more comfortable? How many things did we have a hundred years ago that we could re-implement with the benefit of hindsight and have a much better life than we have today?
  That's a very difficult question, but I would argue that many of them we DO need.
  
  I have been doing a little genealogical research, and what I have found is that up until about 90 years ago, my ancestors were mostly farmers. Since they were farmers, they needed big families. There are many patriarchs in my family who had 15, 20, or even more children. Eventually the wife would die in childbirth and the father would find a new, younger wife. That isn't sustainable over the long term, and it doesn't take many 20-children generations before overpopulation becomes a big problem. It also isn't so great for gender equality. We needed NEEDED technologies that get us out of that.
  
  So then you start thinking about technologies to get out of that situation. Mechanized farming, so less children are needed. Cities, since everyone being a farmer will eventually lead to severe land shortages. Better roads so that people can eat food grown on farms while living in the city. Mechanized transport so that we can get that food to market before it goes bad. Fertilizer to increase yield. Birth control to allow people to have the family size they want. Families are much smaller, so the loss of a child is more significant- you need better medicine to keep them alive. Electricity to power many of these machines. Eventually, computers are needed in order to design every-complicated machines to further these advances. And on it goes
  
  If you don't have these things, what are you? You are Amish (quaint, but unsustainable on a large scale) or you are a 3rd world country.
  
  --
  Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
17. Re:Ah... Yeah... by cold+fjord · 2012-11-05 12:54 · Score: 2
  
  The situation is more dire than you know - no one person knows everything needed to make a pencil.
  Consider even just the lead-
  I, Pencil: My Family Tree as told to Leonard E. Read
  
  My "lead" itself—it contains no lead at all—is complex. The graphite is mined in Ceylon. Consider these miners and those who make their many tools and the makers of the paper sacks in which the graphite is shipped and those who make the string that ties the sacks and those who put them aboard ships and those who make the ships. Even the lighthouse keepers along the way assisted in my birth—and the harbor pilots.
  The graphite is mixed with clay from Mississippi in which ammonium hydroxide is used in the refining process. Then wetting agents are added such as sulfonated tallow—animal fats chemically reacted with sulfuric acid. After passing through numerous machines, the mixture finally appears as endless extrusions—as from a sausage grinder-cut to size, dried, and baked for several hours at 1,850 degrees Fahrenheit. To increase their strength and smoothness the leads are then treated with a hot mixture which includes candelilla wax from Mexico, paraffin wax, and hydrogenated natural fats.
  
  --
  much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
Don't forget ... by PPH · 2012-11-05 06:30 · Score: 3, Funny

... the mineshafts.

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Have gnu, will travel.
1. Re:Don't forget ... by rwa2 · 2012-11-05 07:44 · Score: 2
  
  Hmm, disappointed it wasn't a minecraft video.
  Yeah, someone just needs to introduce these people to running their own server with some of the realism mods... maybe that will get this survivalism fetish out of their systems.
  (but really, all the more power to them. When it hits the fan, I'm certainly gonna have some bloody knuckles from punching trees)
Open Source Bulldozer? by sycodon · 2012-11-05 06:31 · Score: 3, Insightful

An Open Source Bulldozer?
I think these Open Source evangelists are going a bit off their rocker.

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When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
1. Re:Open Source Bulldozer? by MozeeToby · 2012-11-05 06:36 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  There are probably more people in the world who can benefit from a robust, easy to build, easy to repair, fully documented bulldozer than there are people who can benefit from open source software. Now, whether they have actually produced a design that is any of those things is another question that I'm not equipped to try to answer.
2. Re:Open Source Bulldozer? by Firethorn · 2012-11-05 06:42 · Score: 2
  
  Considering that bulldozers are relatively ancient technology, I'd tend to say that there's plenty of designs that are older than their patents, thus fully duplicable without having to pay any licensing cost.
  The trick is that it takes lots of equipment and skill to make a high quality bulldozer, especially from 'scratch'.
  Not that I'd object to a more complete set of 'civilization' specifications, maybe something like designs for a good quality engines in a range from 1/4 hp all the way up to 400 hp.
  
  --
  I don't read AC A human right
3. Re:Open Source Bulldozer? by Anonymous Coward · 2012-11-05 06:45 · Score: 5, Funny
  
  The open source bulldozer is fully documented here.
4. Re:Open Source Bulldozer? by rossdee · 2012-11-05 08:30 · Score: 2
  
  What about Elephants?
  (Indian ones are trainable, self reproducing etc)
Already done in a better way? by pr0t0 · 2012-11-05 06:35 · Score: 5, Informative

Didn't these guys do this last year with the Global Village Construction Set on Kickstarter?
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/622508883/global-village-construction-set

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Misguided... by sinij · 2012-11-05 06:35 · Score: 5, Insightful

Civilization starts with an ability to feed and shelter its members. Not with tractors, open source and agile development techniques.

If you are serious at building civilization survival kit, obsess less with open source (in the event of apocalypse there won't be anyone enforcing patents), but with a designing robust, reliable and highly redundant system to meet basic needs.
Re:Open Source??? by Anonymous Coward · 2012-11-05 06:44 · Score: 2, Funny

Lawyers, like cockroaches, can survive most kinds of disasters.
Chip fabs huh? by ddd0004 · 2012-11-05 06:46 · Score: 3, Funny

I took a look at the picture on the first page and your clean room needs a little work
Postapocalyptech by LeadSongDog · 2012-11-05 06:51 · Score: 2

There are several existing solutions for this problem. The better specialized postapocalyptech for earthmoving is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ox but for more general usage the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horse design is widely preferred. If in doubt, consult the Whole Earth Catalog.

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Re:Post-Apocalypse Petroleum Refinery by __aaeihw9960 · 2012-11-05 07:05 · Score: 3, Informative

And those books already exist.
I agree - tractors and what-not are fine, but that technology exists now, we will get there again. In the event of a full-on collapse, basic survival skills and how we used to do business before modern conveniences become more useful than how to build a diesel engine.
Reinventing the Amish [Re:Ah... Yeah...] by Geoffrey.landis · 2012-11-05 07:11 · Score: 5, Interesting

Basically, these people need to learn from the Amish, who are already skilled in knowing how to survive without the complicated infrastructure of a high-tech society.
--if there really is going to be a civilization-destroying apocalypse, the Amish are going to be the ones who rebuild civilization, 'cause the rest of us all starved to death by about the fifth winter.
(Yes, the Amish don't live completely independently of the rest of society. But they are a darn sight closer than any of the rest of us.)

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http://www.geoffreylandis.com
1. Re:Reinventing the Amish [Re:Ah... Yeah...] by hawguy · 2012-11-05 07:17 · Score: 2
  
  Basically, these people need to learn from the Amish, who are already skilled in knowing how to survive without the complicated infrastructure of a high-tech society.
  --if there really is going to be a civilization-destroying apocalypse, the Amish are going to be the ones who rebuild civilization, 'cause the rest of us all starved to death by about the fifth winter.
  (Yes, the Amish don't live completely independently of the rest of society. But they are a darn sight closer than any of the rest of us.)
  Exactly - if civilization collapses, they are going to be better off with human and animal powered tools since they'll quickly run out of fuel, supplies (like oil), and tools to maintain the powered equipment. Even steam powered equipment needs repair and maintenance.
2. Re:Reinventing the Amish [Re:Ah... Yeah...] by aurispector · 2012-11-05 07:26 · Score: 4, Interesting
  
  Exactly. It's pure arrogance on their part to assume that the expertise at John Deere will be simple to match. Those folks know what they're doing because they've been doing it for generations. Institutional knowledge is a precious thing.
  The other arrogance is to assume that somehow not making a profit will make it all better. A profit is simply an indicator that you are efficiently supplying people with goods and services that they actually want. A tractor that is 70% as good as a Deere won't sell on an open and competitive market where people vote with their dollars.
  
  --
  I have mod points. The reign of terror begins now.
3. Re:Reinventing the Amish [Re:Ah... Yeah...] by MightyYar · 2012-11-05 08:35 · Score: 3, Informative
  
  The difference is that professionals buy John Deere, whereas they don't buy Harbor Freight. You'd be nuts to buy something built like a farm tractor to mow your lawn, where a $200 crap mower from Sears will last you for years. A commercial guy would blow through that mower in a few weeks and will look for quality.
  If I were to buy something like a bench grinder, I might actually buy from Harbor Freight. Sure, it would be crap, but my lifetime total grinding needs (sharpening lawn mower blades once a year, sharpening the chisel once in a while, deburring a piece of cut shelf, etc) probably amount to a week's use in a pro setting.
  
  --
  W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Most of the hurdles are legal by istartedi · 2012-11-05 07:19 · Score: 3, Informative

This happens in Missouri for a reason: lax zoning and a distinct lack of busy-bodies who complain.
This is what California was like 40-50 years when hippies were doing this kind of thing there. Now it's locked up tight. In some cases it's for good reasons. Developers were silting streams and destroying fisheries with ill-advised grading. OTOH, the government is literally telling you where you can poop, which makes doing things like this illegal and/or expensive now. Sometimes it still happens. They can't police communes any better than they can police illegal pot growers; but a project like this out in the open is less likely to happen in CA now, which is a bit sad.
My understanding is that a good chunk of Missouri was depopulated by the 1918 Spanish Flu epidemic. I wonder if too many "back to the land" people like this will eventually cause complaints and ruin it like California.

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For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Blueprints for Civilization: worth watching by Fubari · 2012-11-05 07:21 · Score: 4, Informative

Blueprints for Civilization This TED video is worth 4 minutes of your time.
Jakubowski articulates his vision very clearly.
I remember hearing of this a few years ago; I am glad to see they're making some headway.
Who cares by TheSkepticalOptimist · 2012-11-05 07:32 · Score: 2

I mean if civilization is reduced to the stone age do you really want to survive it?
When I see shows like Doomsday Preppers, and the types of people preparing for the end of the world, it further steadies my belief that I in no way want to survive any of these kinds disasters once the yokels crawl out of their caves and spider holes.

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I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
1. Re:Who cares by ScentCone · 2012-11-05 08:49 · Score: 3, Funny
  
  Has it ever occurred to you that the people who know how to farm, hunt and gut a deer, hand-load ammo, and know which mushrooms will or won't kill you ... that they think you're the one that will make a post-apocalyptic world intolerable? Where's my latte! Why isn't there a better set of legislative checks and balances on who in this survival village gets to own a gun! Who do I get to do the laundry around here? My mobile device isn't getting any kind of signal out here! Say, who's the local dentist - I've got a toothache ... but he's got to take Visa, because I have nothing valuable to trade except awesome WoW skills and some excellent Class 10 SD cards.
  
  Blam. Get his shoes, and check those SD cards for any quality porn.
  
  --
  Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
This is for Africa, not post-apocalypse by robot256 · 2012-11-05 08:01 · Score: 2

Not sure if the reporter missed this or if it's just a Slashdot obsession, but I'm sure I read before that these guys are trying to make technology accessible to third-world countries. Their goal is not (necessarily) to bootstrap a post-apocalyptic economy, but to bootstrap starving villages so that they can rapidly increase food output using all the tech we can bring to bear in a cheap, interchangeable manner.
A Civilization Starter Kit? by CommieLib · 2012-11-05 08:41 · Score: 2

I nominate Detroit for beta testing.

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If your bitterest enemies are people who hack the heads off civilians, then I would say you're doing something right.
Do they have someone... by Bartles · 2012-11-05 10:54 · Score: 2

developing an open source Kool-Aid recipe?