The Survival Machine Farm

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."

Comments

Ah... Yeah...

[Frosty Piss]

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...

Re:Ah... Yeah...

[Millennium]

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.

Re:Ah... Yeah...

[ColdWetDog]

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.

Re:Ah... Yeah...

[JWW]

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....

Re:Ah... Yeah...

[RMingin]

Go play Fallout 1. Been done. We called it a GECK there.

Re:Ah... Yeah...

[ArhcAngel]

If cockroaches survived the last apocalypse then I suspect patent trolls will survive this one.

Re:Ah... Yeah...

[Shoten]

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...

Re:Ah... Yeah...

[jdray]

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?

Re:Ah... Yeah...

[SB9876]

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.

Already done in a better way?

[pr0t0]

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

Misguided...

[sinij]

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 Bulldozer?

[MozeeToby]

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.

Re:Open Source Bulldozer?

[Anonymous Coward]

The open source bulldozer is fully documented here.

Reinventing the Amish [Re:Ah... Yeah...]

[Geoffrey.landis]

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.)

Re:Reinventing the Amish [Re:Ah... Yeah...]

[aurispector]

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.

Blueprints for Civilization: worth watching

[Fubari]

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.