Civilization In a Box

We have proposed here the notion of a Civilization-in-a-Box that can be replicated inexpensively anywhere in the world. These units are points of light - meaning places that truly educate and truly produce - with distributed eco-industry fueled by the sun. We claim that with enough of these, we can transcend artificial scarcity. We can create new politics, as regenerative development grows to provide the new economic base. The main struggle is that with ignorance - quick and dirty ways of doing things are attractive to entrepreneurs, whereas more elegant ways take more time to develop. For which reason the enlightened entrepreneur must have patience. As Amory Lovins said -

(Ddarknesss spreading at the speed of light quote)

In a nutshell - the economy must do a bunch of mundane things that civilization does today: produce food, energy, and education - and a place to thrive in harmony with natural life support systems. We know that modern advanced society has sufficient technology to do this. We must do this with local and renewable resources - which by definition do not run out and are a prerequisite to regenerative development. In a few hundred years, I hope that we look back at how ignorant people were to carry a permanent warfare economy for thousands of years - before Open Source Ecology became a non-fringe concept.

Solar panels are 40 cents per watt - and for a resilient system, we must build that into our economy. Starting from sand.

We know that we must have metal processing - either scrap or aluminum from clay - so we can create advanced civilization.

We must have the sun, as we said it provides 10,000 times more power than we use today - and every 20 days the earth receives as much energy as the 500 years of oil reserves.

We must have water, for it fuels plants and a future hydrogen economy. There is no other fuel as abundant as hydrogen. Today hydrogen is scoffed at by people who want to go to Mars instead.

Integrated agroecology provides a system for both wildlife and human food production, especially with aquaponic greenhouses that produce 100x more food than a temperate outdoors scene.

The open source microfactory is key, where every single person on earth can contribute to the Open Source Everything Store.

Crowdfunding and crowd design gets us the development effort via massive design challenges.

Immersion training seeds new OSE Fellows - who - if they stick around for 4 years - they graduate to build another OSE Campus.

Fig. The Basic Top 12 eco-industry elements of a Civilization in a Box: (1) solar panels starting from sand refined to silicon; (2) aluminum from clay; (3) bricks from clay; (4) transparent glazing from plants; (5) cement from rock; (6) steel from scrap; (7) lumber from trees; (8) hay, pellets, charcoal fuel from plants; (9) food from integrated agroecology and aquaponics; (10) CNC multimachine for precision metal; (11) 3D printing for metal, glazing, plastic, rubber, insulation, and ceramics; (12) aluminum wire for electricity.