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The Survival Machine Farm

Posted by samzenpus on 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."

25 of 214 comments (clear)

  1. Ah... Yeah... by Frosty+Piss · · 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...

    --
    If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
    1. Re:Ah... Yeah... by Millennium · · 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 · · 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 · · 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 tgd · · 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.

    5. Re:Ah... Yeah... by RMingin · · 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.
    6. Re:Ah... Yeah... by ArhcAngel · · 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
    7. Re:Ah... Yeah... by LMariachi · · Score: 3, Informative

      That was Fallout 2. The Macguffin in the first one was the water chip.

    8. Re:Ah... Yeah... by Shoten · · 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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    9. Re:Ah... Yeah... by jdray · · 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
    10. Re:Ah... Yeah... by SB9876 · · 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.

  2. Don't forget ... by PPH · · Score: 3, Funny

    ... the mineshafts.

    --
    Have gnu, will travel.
  3. Open Source Bulldozer? by sycodon · · Score: 3, Insightful

    An Open Source Bulldozer?

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

    --
    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 · · 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 Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

      The open source bulldozer is fully documented here.

  4. Already done in a better way? by pr0t0 · · 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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  5. Misguided... by sinij · · 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.

  6. Chip fabs huh? by ddd0004 · · Score: 3, Funny

    I took a look at the picture on the first page and your clean room needs a little work

  7. Re:Post-Apocalypse Petroleum Refinery by __aaeihw9960 · · 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.

  8. Reinventing the Amish [Re:Ah... Yeah...] by Geoffrey.landis · · 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.)

    --
    http://www.geoffreylandis.com
    1. Re:Reinventing the Amish [Re:Ah... Yeah...] by aurispector · · 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.
    2. Re:Reinventing the Amish [Re:Ah... Yeah...] by MightyYar · · 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.
  9. Most of the hurdles are legal by istartedi · · 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.

    --
    For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
  10. Blueprints for Civilization: worth watching by Fubari · · 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.

  11. Re:Who cares by ScentCone · · 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.