H Plus Summit Slides Text

Slide 1- Cover

I will tell about our work on building the World's First, Replicable, Post-Scarcity Resilient Community. My name is marcin, my background is: born in Poland - ph.d. in fusion energy physics from U. Wisconsin, Madison, but now I took a mid course correction. Let me tell you about it.

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Imagine if you took all that society has learned to date, and applied it to making a better world. Then you have a situation of post-scarcity economies with resilient communities. I mean humanscape, just like today, but based on open source knowledge - scalable from little community, town, to city. How could it be?

Humanity are at a unique point in history of high tech and instant communication. Today, it's possible to create advanced civilization from dirt and sticks, anywhere. This has been proven historically - except on a the global scale. THat scenario included plundering each other to the tune of 150M war deaths per century, and current events indicate that this is not the end of it . Let's cut that out, and get high-tech, advanced neosubsistence from any piece of land - living from local resources by using advanced technology and automation. This makes war obsolete, governments disappear as there is no more need to redistribute wealth (the role of gummit), and population explosion is impossible if we're using local resources to live.

The good news is - living 100% from the land immediately around you could be a trivial possibility using today's technology. You say no way, how can I do that? Well, you'd have to become an integrated human - capable and powerful - but that's the theme of this conference, so I will continue.

Let's build a post-scarcity town. No doomsday scenarios are required.

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We start with 6 ways to die, and how to avoid it: too cold, too hot, hunger, thirst, illness, injury. Thus, we need to produce some basic requirements to avoid this: food, energy, housing, technology - so we don't need to keep running out of food and causing trouble. All energy comes from the sun, and nature provides all materials. To thrive, we convert these materials to useful form by using tools of information and technology.

It boils down to energy - do we have it? The USA, electricity use is about 500 GW (under 2 kW per person) these days. You don't have to be a NASA scientist to verify that this power can be generated from a square area of 100 miles on the side, using 10% efficient solar thermal concentrators to generate electricity. This is about .3% of the area of the USA, and four times less than the area covered by all roads. Next.

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If we have energy, then we can have materials. Let's turn dirt into advanced civilization. Take ubiquitous clay, and you can smelt aluminum. This is also known as advanced civilization. Take ubiquitous sand and you have silicon. This is also known as the digital age.

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For technology - space age Star Trek replicator is here. Here's my favorite example. With 3D printing, you can download a design from across the globe and print it on your desktop. 3D printing is like a MiniChina on your desktop. And here comes the power of Open Source. You can build RepRap - the Open Source 3d printer - for 300 in parts. It would cost you $10k to get a commercial version.

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We are developing a small subset of technology known as the Global Village Construction Set (GVCS), or Resilient Community Construction Set (RCCS). This is asmall set of tools sufficient for building advanced civilization. In particular, we claim that with these 40 technologies and metal plus electronic components from the greater world - we can create advanced civilization on a shoestring budget. That assumes, of course, that we have people to use these tools.

These tools include cars, tractors, construction equipment, solar power generation, and adaptable, digital fabrication. You can use the digital fabrication to build a copy of the entire toolset from scrap steel. (40 pieces)

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We have built some parts of the GVCS: OS tractor...

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Open source CNC torch table prototype:

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...and CEB press. It is open source, it was crowd funded (including our workshop), and it contributes to post-scarcity.

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You have seen notions of cost reduction. Yes. Factor of 30 for RepRap. We have shown similar for CEB press- $2500 in materials. The next competitor is $45000 for a 10 bpm machine, we think we can do 12 bricks per minute with ours. So we're talking 10-20 cost reduction.

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So maybe this is a great example of post-scarcity economics for real needs? How about CEB housing:

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But we're really interested in resilient communities.

We prefer this ecocities on land as shown in the pictures

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The work is beginning to bear fruit.

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One of our competitors is Seasteading - and i mention this because the founder is at this conference as well. We think it's much easier on land, if you have a resource based economy, becuase you don't have a $10/sq foot tax on your platform (in the form of depreciation at sea).

Our competition is the mainstream economy. So our main competitor is people enjoying their 9 to 5s. We gather a few friends, live happily ever after. What are the conditions under which our offer is widely adopted everywhere, to create a Viral Village pattern? Can a resource-based economy work?

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A resource-based economy means that you are processing natural resources using advanced but appropriate, open source technology. You create an economy of products, not federal reserve notes that are backed only by faith, because that belief can vaporize at any time. Can we compete with mainstream production? This means, in the broadest scale, can we compete with agriculture and technology as we know it today? Modern agriculture is the use of land to convert petroleum into food. Our proposed post-scarcity route is conversion of land to food using biomass fuel for machines, humans, and animals. For doing this, we need to do 25 hours or under per person per year - that's how much time a person spends grocery shopping. We have a plan for 12 hours per person per year - permacultural garden, edible landscape, animals, and field crop with automated tractor. This is easy to do with permaculture, mechanization, and automation. It's harder if you go to genetic engineering and growing everything in test tubes. It's doable, but each choice has its consequences.

The main attraction from the societal perspective is that if we live from local resources, population explosion is impossible - by design of visible resource feedback.

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Lifestyle? The critical gap in post-carbon, doomsday, ecovillage, and other fatalist scenarios are that these movements promote restrictions on prosperity. We propose neosubsistence - high-techself-providing option, where trade happens only if you want it to happen, not because you are forced to do it. In this scenario, you don't work hard as much as you work smart. The reward is time liberated for other pursuits. This could be existential crisis if you no longer know what to do with yourself - for whom evolving to freedom is not an option. But if you do want to evolve to freedom, the extra time available will help you do that very well. Materials are not an issue. Energy isn't. Peoples' imagination is the limit on this one.

But, lifetime design equipment is key - or you can't keep up with your tools. 10% depreciation on all type of equipment means slavery to maintenance - so you need products that are not designed to break. This is a missing link that we're addressing with lifetime design in the GVCS.

So we're coming up with Construction Sets - Tractor Construction Set, Steam Engine Construction Set, FabLab Construction Set - everything made of plug-and-play modules that you can understand and work with.

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This brings me to fabrication aspects. Move on to RepLab - the open source fab lab. You may have heard of the fab lab - the lab scale microfactory where they claim you can make just about anything - the mini-china on your desktop. RepLab Construction Set is what we're interested in general - plug-in modules for all types of fabrications. You can make antennas for wireless from chicken wire and CNC routed frames - FabFi from the FabLab work. The RepLab is a universal constructor.

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As technology drops in size, and information flows increase - the inevitable is technological recursion where anyone can make anything anywhere. You can create a locus of advanced civilization - on a 30 acre freehold. That's our experiment.

The last frontier in decent materials - or decentralization materials. Take Open Source Fab Lab, and reproduce technological process down to all industry, and smelt aluminum from clay and silicon from sand. Do this locally, so you don't have to go to war to get the same, especially if solar energy is available.

As technology drops in size, and information flows increase - the inevitable is technological recursion where anyone can make anything anywhere. You can create a locus of advanced civilization - on a 30 acre parcel. That's our experiment.

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What's the economy? Digital fabrication and permaculture for food, energy, and technology base like cars and fuels. neosubsistence. Produce if you like. Let an automated tractor do your agriculture, or a robot milk your goats. Time requirement - we're doing an experiment that shows 12 hours of time per person per year for all your food needs. That's less than the time you go grocery shopping. This grows and collects your energy and fuels. You live a quality of life where you decide what to do with your time. The rest is harvest and enjoying local food. You can go to the restaurant, too. We do trade, but we also know how to produce everything.

Does this seem crazy? The fundamental question is - do people want to become integrated humans who understand basic systems theory that points to everything being interconnected? Can we reconnect to ourselves, our deepest needs, to others, to nature? Production - or use of nature to meet needs - is the deepest form of connection - to nature and to oneself - that anyone can strive for in practice. Advanced humanity is integrated humanity - which does not throw out the basics in search for disintegrated point solutions. Those can only be bandaids to our complex, integrated existence. The question boils down to our capacity to take responsibility for the world around us - and that is living and letting live by being as productive and powerful as possible.

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What's unique? This is not talk only. It's an integrated program. Become a lifetime developer/investor with a R&D lifestyle where you're the guinea pig

What are the challenges? People think that the technology base - easy survival - is the stopping block. No, with minor adaptation of existing technology - to make it open source, lower-cost, documented - and therefore teachable and replicable - we have potential of widescale adaptation - to what we call Viral Village.

The above are not the real challenges- the real challenge is the shackles on peoples' mind - as they insist to be mindless teeth on the cogs of the soul crunching machine - that's the mainstream. We're racing to the bottom, in general, while most of us think it's ok. We are all in it together - there is no 'us' or 'they.'

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In conclusion - we're showing certain unique concepts being implemented:

   * The infrastructure for a real, post scarcity community with complete economy, off grid, high-tech neosubsistence.
   * Open source production and free biz models for post-scarcity creation
   * New social organization - autonomy on land if this is adopted. 

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The real deal: autonomy, no sacrifice in comfort, full freedom to pursue what you need. This is unbelievable for most, but real if you choose it - as you can't depend on the next guy to do this. Start a new system, this one is broken - and evolve to freedom.