What Does it Cost to Build the GVCS?

What does it cost to build the GVCS?

The CEB workshop is priced at $400

Housing cost during the summer of Extreme Design-Build is $15 a day for $1815 for June thru Sept

The month of May, would be $310

Subtotal = $2525

Basic Tools http://opensourceecology.org/wiki/How_to_Build_the_4_Machines_in_a_Basic_Workshop $2100 Advanced worshop tools $14,100 (OSE cost pending development of these tools) some overlap in tools and some are not completed.

You mentioned the Automated Brick Press the bill of Materials is $4k I thought I read some where the the entire Civilization Starter kit was projected at 10K?

I also read ...

If the cost of training is $10k per person, then a core team of 4 trainees can leave their 6 month immersion training with: (1), a highly integrated, practical skill set covering all sectors of the productive economy (agriculture, construction, energy, technology); (2), connection to a network of change agents around the globe; and (3), $80k of startup capital for their own facility.

Please, if possible??? help me with understanding what it would take to put the Civilization kit on wheels, per say, to relocate back to Colorado and setup shop. Pikes pike or Bust style and be a sustainable experiment that I could then help recreate?

- Steve

Response

The cost depends on the (1) level of access to machines of the GVCS, (2) the amount of direct teaching time that OSE provides vs. a person pursuing everything on their own, (3), whether one is counting labor or not, (4) whether one has access to land.

In the limit of entire GVCS being available to someone, and that person having a team of 12 skilled people - then one takes the blueprints, smelts aluminum from clay, produces bioplastics from plants, produces fuel and energy from biomass and solar concentration electric, produces rubber from dandelion root resin, produces ceramics from clays, grows their own food, and produces a new GVCS for $5 - the internet download time and electricity required to keep a laptop on during production of the new GVCS.

In the limit of having the entire GVCS and starting from scrap steel - the cost will be 10 cents per pound for scrap steel, and the entire GVCS will be built for $10,000 (about 100,000 lb of steel).

In the limit of no tools of the GVCS being available, labor being purchased, and one having to buy stock steel at about $1/lb - the cost of starting a new civilization will be $100,000 in materials, plus labor, facilities food, energy and fuel of production, facility costs, consumables, labor, and everything else. This may end up being $1M dollars in total, assuming access to open IP where OSE designs have been refined to 1 day production times for all of them.

We are collecting data points to validate the above claims. On April 25, we are documenting the ergonomics of production of our first machine, the brick press, to determine whether the open source production model is competitive with industry standard techniques for heavy machine production.

Links

• Assuming off-shelf materials - Cost Comparison of the GVCS to Industry Standards
• What happens to the economics when one generates steel from scrap - Technological Recursion