Seed Home v2 Future Work
The essence of the seed home project is inspiring public solving of pressing world issues. As such, we involve the public in:
- Funding real R&D to solve housing
- Development work towards more integrated solutions - Extreme Hackathons
- Creating jobs - publishing all of our work as Distributive Enterprise, and providing training.
Development Path
It is clear to us that autonomous, energy and food-producing housing is the natural evolution of housing. Critical technologies to enable this include:
- PV - already avialable at under 40 cents per watt
- Electrical Energy storage - between smart home energy technology, smart refrigeration, wind power and battery backup - current technology allows for complete off-grid operation in housing at a cost actually lower than grid electricity. Typical payback times using OSE technology are on the order of 2-5 years compared to grid electricity.
- Aquaponics and closed loop organic cycle - with biodigester, worm towers, fungi towers, and aquaponic towars, duckweed and azolla - completely closed loop waste cycles can be created where waste is converted to food and fertilizer, all within the area of a greenhouse. Think of an advanced system that does not send waste down the sewers - but instead is turned into lush greenery and food.
- Autonomous Water System
The above are immediate technologies to be implemented. Further tech development is:
- Saturated Water Storage - storing thermal energy for steam engines to release when the sun is not shining
- Nickel Iron Batteries - this is the only sustainable battery known so far for energy storage
- Solar Hydrogen - as fuel for night time power, vehicles, cars - burned in stainless steel, water-lubricated engines, and not in fuel cells. This is the holy grail of carbon-free energy. With solar energy solved, we can move on to true prosperity for humans without material constraints, such as burning up our environment.
- Biomass pellets and charcoal - an appliance to make wood pellets for a wood pellet space-heating stove - from wood clippings, grass clippings, and paper waste. The byproduct of an advanced pellet stove could be charcoal pellets, which are also a fuel source for backup power.
- Autonomous vehicles - for yard work, house cleaning, agriculture, utility, and delivery work. For example, pull a chicken tractor through your yard automatically, or deliver food for a Community Supported Agriculture operation using an autonomous, solar vehicle.
- Automated Agriculture - Farmbot-related technology for growing food, with open source supply chain for producing these machines.
- 3D Printing - for producing modular construction panels and lumber from the plastic waste stream
Global Village Development
The Seed Home lends itself well for multi-family housing and global villages, and that is where the power of the OBI program and the Global Village Construction Set can shine. Building community-scale developments such as the OSE Campus becomes possible. Other human developments also become possible - that are like standard development- but incorporate agriculture, energy, production, and livelihoods on a microscale of today's global supply chains. This is OSE's intent - building settlements that allow for regenerative livelihoods free from structural evil, where people have an honest opportunity to develop on a humanizing front. This means free from special interest propaganda or structural evil of the mainstream. Idealogically, the goal is to create a framework where true human development can happen - in harmony with natural life support systems - where Self-Determination becomes the primary pursuit.
Integrated food systems, waste management systems, and productivity systems are an inherent part of such a community. The model will be based on the current functions and infrastructures of society, but optimized for increased integrity from a systems approach to thriving.