[ExI] Lack of interest

[Bryan Bishop]

On Thu, May 8, 2008 at 1:06 AM, Damien Sullivan
<phoenix at ugcs.caltech.edu> wrote:
>> What we really need to do is come up with a way that provides
>> renewable energy at a lower cost than coal and oil.  I think there is
>> such a way.  Anyone interested in seeing work on it should send me
>> email.  No point in sending it to the uninterested on the list.
>
> I'd say just send it to the list.  As on topic as anything else going
> on.  Tough goal, though, to compete with high-quality fuel we can just
> slurp freely out of the ground.

Why compete with it?  As for Keith's question, I have a few pages up
on my site that might eventually do the trick. I want orbital algae
farms for getting solar energy, with bioharvesting approaches there,
solar powered satellites, solar array farms, etc. But all of these
require space-based manufacturing approaches, and that's what we can
focus on first, like asteroid mining, which could be done through,
say, the moontank approach. I recently made contact with John Cumbers
again, after meeting him through OpenWetWare and the diybio group in
Boston, he also does some biobricks work last I checked (I might be
wrong). Anyway, he's going off to do research in the
cyanobacteria-for-the-moon project that recently made the news. Same
thing here. There are, in fact, experiments that you can run in your
own home (the moontank) to try to make bacteria that can mine
asteroids. But then we need manufacturing knowledge, and ways to
innovate or at least find the good processing protocols that we aren't
currently aware of.

http://oscomak.net/

"OSCOMAK supports playful learning communities of individuals and groups
chaordically building free and open source knowledge, tools, and simulations
which lay the groundwork for humanity's sustainable development on
Spaceship Earth and
eventual joyful, compassionate, and diverse expansion into space
(including Mars, the Moon, the Asteroids, or elsewhere in the Universe).
Artwork derived from NASA artwork by Rick Guidice on Space Colonization
blended with a modified version of the Land-use plan artwork by Richard Iriga
from the Development Art collection using The GIMP under Debian GNU/Linux

The OSCOMAK project will foster a community in which many interested
individuals will contribute to the creation of a distributed global
repository of manufacturing knowledge about past, present and future
processes, materials, and products. OSCOMAK stands for "OSCOMAK
Semantic Community On Manufactured Artifacts and Know-how".

The OSCOMAK project is supporting the OpenVirgle Project for Space
Habitats via Semantic MediaWiki pages starting here

The project's short-term benefits will include:

technology education,
historical education,
sustainable technology development,
public science literacy, and
knowledge democratization.

The project's ultimate long-term goal will be to generate a repository
of knowledge that will support the design and creation of space
habitats. Three forces -- individual creativity, social collaboration,
and technological tools -- will join to create a synergistic effort
stronger than any of these forces could produce alone. "

http://openvirgle.net/

"What started as an April Fool joke by Google for 2008 called Project
Virgle is now a real and genuine effort by an increasing number of
people to create ideas and ways in which humankind can live
sustainably in space using free and open source technology. This
project is a place for all space enthusiasts to cooperate on
simulations of space settlements. Rather than argue whether L5 or Mars
or the asteroids or the Moon or the rings of Saturn should be
humankind's first space settlement, we could be asking what is common
between those efforts so that that groundwork can be shared."

http://osaerospace.com/wiki/tiki-index.php?page=Linkdumps
http://heybryan.org/exp.html

I call it "metarepo" - although individuals have to make the
significant contribuions, here's no reason we shouldn't streamline the
work and progress on these projects of importance. I'm modeling it off
of debian's apt, or gentoo's portage, yum, and so on, leaving in the
distributed elements while also 'semantically grounding' the software
back to reality via fablab automation. Among other things.

More on this approach later.

- Bryan