[ExI] Fwd: [Open Manufacturing] Fwd: [luf-team] Re: maybe im crazy, but why is most of these projects not working?

[Bryan Bishop]

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Paul D. Fernhout <pdfernhout at kurtz-fernhout.com>
Date: Mon, Mar 14, 2011 at 8:48 AM
Subject: Re: [Open Manufacturing] Fwd: [luf-team] Re: maybe im crazy, but
why is most of these projects not working?
To: openmanufacturing at googlegroups.com


On 3/10/11 6:51 PM, Bryan Bishop wrote:

> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> From: Eric Hunting<erichunting at gmail.com>
> Date: Thu, Mar 10, 2011 at 5:42 PM
> Subject: [luf-team] Re: maybe im crazy, but why is most of these projects
> not working?
> To: luf-team at yahoogroups.com
> [snip]
> But in those 50 years, after the production of a book, countless designs,
> works of art, and models, numerous media interviews, and a whole series of
> very nice documentary videos, the only physical accomplishment of The Venus
> Project is the construction of Fresco's own futuristic home/studio compound
> in Venus Florida -and they nearly lost that as it went up for sale a few
> years ago. (folks here may remember I was actually toying with the notion
> of
> buying it to use as the LUF HQ because I feared what the knuckle-headed
> developers in Florida will do with such lovely architecture and because we
> desperately need the same kind of studio and workshop facilities) What went
> wrong? Well, the key problem is that the Venus Project narrative is
> critically incomplete. Fresco is a designer and thinks like one. He does
> the
> 'visioneering'. The messy details of implementation is someone else's
> department -and that someone else never materialized. He believed that if
> he
> could just paint a sufficiently compelling picture of the future it would
> make everyone realize the abject squalor of contemporary life and demand a
> revolution. But pictures of lovely architecture and sexy cars, planes, and
> boats don't tell you how to get from A to B. The Venus Project is like a
> beautiful matt painting of a wonderful city propped-up on the horizon but
> with no obvious path going there. It's a Greek temple on a golf course
> model
> of the future. And so the public never got it. (do you remember when I once
> suggested here that every settlement in TMP should plan to include a Greek
> themed miniature golf course?)
>

I've been watching the 1960s Thunderbird TV series by Gerry and Sylvia
Anderson (who later made UFO and Space 1999). They had a vision of the
future, too. And it was a pretty good one in a lot of ways.

I think one issue with the Venus Project is this notion that we have, say,
about five different types of economies (growing as someone suggested I add
another):
* Subsistence
* Gift
* Planned
* Exchange
* Parisitical/Theft

Fresco is very right about pointing out a lot of contemporary problems,
including the waste from competition and how we need a better understanding
of the possibilities of good engineering. But, just because you are right in
pointing out some problems, or you are right in pointing out some general
areas needing improvement, that does not mean you are right about the
particulars for any solution. (I could say the same thing about myself and
what I talk about.)

Fresco focuses essentially on the planned economy, and in particular,
cybernetically planned. Apparently, he won't admit to the issue that the
values of the programmers would be embodied in the cybernetic system. As
soon as we talk about values, we talk about culture, and politics, and
conflicts. And then we are back to square one of a lot of social issues. I
think we can resolve a lot of values conflict issues, but not by denying
them or thinking some big machine is going to make them go away. A big
machine might, actually make them go away, but only by taking away a lot of
other things most people like, such as in the book by Madeline L'Engle "A
Wrinkle in Time".
 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Wrinkle_in_Time
"The children travel to Camazotz to rescue Meg's father. They find that all
the inhabitants behave in a mechanistic way and seem to be all under the
control of a single mind. They look for the central headquarters on the
planet (described as CENTRAL Central Intelligence) and they discover a man
with red eyes with telepathic abilities who can cast a hypnotic spell over
their minds. He claims to know the whereabouts of their father. Charles
Wallace looks into his eyes and becomes taken over by the mind controlling
the planet. Under its influence, he takes Meg and Calvin to the place where
Dr. Murry is being held prisoner because he would not succumb to the group
mind. The planet turns out to be controlled by an evil disembodied brain
with powerful telepathic abilities, which the inhabitants of Camazotz call
"IT". Charles Wallace takes them to the place where IT is held, and in close
proximity to IT, all of them are threatened by a possible telepathic
takeover of their minds. "

Anyway, so while the Venus Project is full of great ideas, it still has a
high technocratic focus, and that probably turns a lot of people off.

In general, I like what Fresco says, but there is this issue of "the machine
is going to make all our decisions for us perfectly" that is going to not be
very appealing (even to me).

I feel some reasons the Millennial Project has not succeeded more (beyond
Savage somehow stepping away from the movement?) is that there is so much to
still do on Earth that is quite interesting. It is dual-use in a lot of
ways. So, TMP or for that matter the Venus Project asks for a person of two
conflicting characters:
* a practical minded down-to-Earth nose-to-the-grindstone
do-all-the-heavy-lifting type of engineering/politician person, and
* a pie-in-the-sky dreamer who is going to focus all the practical skill and
energy on long term dreams even as the world in many ways is desperately
crying out for a lot of basic infrastructure hear and now (renewable energy,
cold fusion, passive solar homes, organic agriculture, 3D printers that can
also recycle what they print, a better understanding of human health and
nutrition, and so on).

So, I think that fundamental conflict is why something like TMP has trouble
recruiting. Now, there are some few people in the world who have strong
aspects of both, but they are very rare. And, even when you find someone
like that, TMP might have a better long term chance of success if they work
at short-term on Earth goals.

That is why, like with the OSCOMAK project as an extension of my own
interests in building space habitats, I gradually became more and more
focused on understanding on-Earth issues. There is so much overlap that it
just makes sense to make the Earth work first, IMHO. Granted, at some point
people may have to choose, especially if the Earth embroils itself in
self-destructive wars from focusing on a scarcity socioeconomics with the
tools of abundance turned into superweapons, but that day is not quite hear,
and even if it was, it might well be too late, since the mental
war-mongering contagion would spread to space no doubt.

This conflict is not made easier by knowing, while you make personal
sacrifices, that there are literally hundreds of thousands of people paid
good salaries with benefits to be working in the aerospace field (civilian,
NASA, military) and who are doing aerospace stuff (like building cruise
missiles), but at the same time who are mostly disconnected politically from
the idea of building a future for humanity in space. Most of that energy
outside of civilian aviation sadly seems to go to either stunts (President
Kennedy essentially said the trip to the Moon was to prove to the USSR that
the USA could bomb them with rockets) or conflict (Predator drones). Most
civilian aviation is pointless (replaceable by telecommuting) or luxury
(related to consumerism) or supports a parasitical business apparatus. Even
express movement of parts by air can be replaced by local fabrication. And
when aviation is needed, like to visit relatives abroad, civil aviation
speaks more to dysfunctional social dynamics in our society destroying
families and communities by forcing people apart (including by displacement
through war, as happened with my parents). Anyway, so we see vast amounts of
money poured into aerospace, but mostly being misused relative to making the
world work for everyone and creating a chance for humans to access new
resources in space. Still, that's a little harsh, I know. :-) I'm not
against aviation, especially if it can be made non-polluting and put to good
ends; I do think travel and visiting other cultures is in general a good
thing. My point is just that when you think about being part of some big TMP
movement, the obvious question is, if the globe is spending hundreds of
billions of dollars a year on aerospace activities, why are those people not
making something better happen with all those resources than shuttling
around business executives to resort hotels or shuttling around people to
visit relatives they have been separated from by war or merciless
socioeconomic trends? Bucky Fuller kept asking, how can aerospace technology
and thinking help the planet in a deep way? It seems like the world has not
entirely deeply thought that through yet...

Anyway, I know TMP has the Aquarius stage, which is on Earth in the ocean.
But, even that is so ambitious. What about urban homesteads? Or community
gardens? (See Isles, Inc.). It seems the bigger issues with all this are
social at this point more than technical, although there is value in making
the technical more understandable or better organized, since a lot of the
social problems come from misunderstanding what is technically possible or
how trends are changing the technical landscape (thus fears over Peak Oil
when we have endless solar power and rapidly dropping PV costs, due to basic
misunderstanding and related fear mongering).


 We are in an era of
> accelerating successive economic and environmental catastrophe and the
> ruling class is desperately trying to circle the wagons and cash-out in
> advance of the ultimate collapse they've engineered. And the cultural
> result
> of all this is a wave of middle-class anxiety throughout the industrialized
> world.
>

I agree with your point about the middle class as "guards" in the sense that
Howard Zinn said it too:
 http://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/zinncomrev24.html
"That will happen, I think, only when all of us who are slightly privileged
and slightly uneasy begin to see that we are like the guards in the prison
uprising at Attica—expendable; that the Establishment, whatever rewards it
gives us, will also, if necessary to maintain its control, kill us. "

But with that said, I think the reason our scarcity-ideology-based
socioeconomic system is failing is widespread material abundance, not
increasing scarcity. :-) The environment has taken a lot of abuse, it's
true, including problems with collapsing fisheries, pollution, and so on.
But the environment has always been going through ups and downs (like from
supervolcano explosions and asteroid hits and Tsunamis and ice ages and so
on). Anyway, I'm not sure one can focus on an environmental catastrophe as
the end of our way of life, because there is little I know of in the current
way of things that could not be set right environmentally (as far as humans
having a nice personal environment) with a couple decades on enlightened
policies that don't focus on short-term benefits. We can move people to
higher ground for rising sea levels if that is a problem, we can change our
fishing practices, we can stop burning forest in the Amazon, we can
remediate superfund sites, and so on. Yes there will be continuing species
loss, but on the plus side we are getting better at genetic engineering. We
should do what we can to protect the environment, but I see that more as a
moral issue than a practical one (even as there are practical aspects of it)
-- I'm just trying to put those issues in perspective on a big planet that
has been constantly changing.


 Joseph has clued into that. Clued into that aspect of Fresco's versions of
> modern history and economics that basically explain how and why the world
> got f-ed up. And then he played-up the angle of conspiracy because that
> very
> effectively pushes people's buttons. Fresco only talked about a
> socio-economic pathology inherent to a culture that evolved with the early
> Industrial Age unable to fully shake-off the vestiges of feudalism and a
> peasant psychology. Other progressives aren't so moderate. They will point
> fingers at specific people and institutions benefiting from social
> exploitation and start declaring it time to build guillotines. I can't say
> if that's right or wrong, but it's been effective at motivating people by
> turning unfocused mass despair into directed anger. Combine this with the
> novelty of the Internet as an alternative to the now tainted and dubious
> corporate mass media, and you've got a 'movement'.
>

I agree the Zeitgeist movie series has been influential, but I feel it also
is weak by focusing purely or Jacque Fresco. What about Amory Lovins? What
about Nancy and John Todd? What about Buckminster Fuller? What about Fidel
Castro and the Cuban miracle related to distributed agriculture when the
Soviet oil was cut off to adapt to living with less oil after some rough
spots? What about Western Europe and its universal health care? What about
the free software movement? What about Paul Hawken and "Blessed Unrest"?
What about the Google founders helping fund Nanosolar? What about Alan Kay
and Doug Engelbart and Ted Nelson and Tim Berners-Lee and personal computing
and the internet? What about the Whole Earth Catalog? What about... The list
goes on and on...


 But anger directed to what? As I understand it, the Zeitgeist movement
> loses
> people at about the same fast rate it now wins them because once these now
> motivated folks start joining groups and forums and going to Venus Project
> conferences and lectures, they discover there is nothing for them to
> actually do because Fresco simply never had a plan to build his model
> future. Just a design. Just a Futurama exhibit. Zeitgeist leadership seems
> to be becoming aware of this problem and is trying to address it, but
> they've been in denial and operating in a vacuum relative to the larger
> global progressive movement for a long time. They have a lot of ground to
> cover while the enthusiasm they've finally won rots on the vine. I wish
> them
> the best of luck because their objectives are complimentary to ours and the
> the world in general needs working solutions to its rapidly escalating
> crisis.
>

I think it is easy to get caught up in "the sky is falling" even when the
sky is falling. :-) It's a big planet. There is a lot going on. As you say,
there is a global progressive movement (and that includes the Greens no some
extent, even if they are sometimes technophobic rather than focusing on the
right technology for the right values). It is easy, given the mass media, to
not see all that is going on, and all that has been going on. So, in that
sense, the Zeitgeist movie (and even the Venus Project) are misleading...
Maybe in a deep way people begin to realize that when they start to look
around?

See also:
 http://sociology.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/change/science_freshstart.html
"#1. The People Are Not Bamboozled ... Based on these findings, it seems
likely that everyday people don't opt for social change in good part because
they don't see any plausible way to accomplish their goals, and haven't
heard any plans from anyone else that make sense to them. But why don't they
just say "the hell with it" and head to the barricades? Why aren't they "fed
up?" The answer is not in their false consciousness or a mere resigned
acquiescence, as many leftists seem to believe, but in a very different set
of factors. On the one hand, for all the injustices average Americans
experience and perceive, there are many positive aspects to everyday life
that make a regular day-to-day existence more attractive than a general
strike or a commitment to building a revolutionary party. They have loved
ones they like to be with, they have hobbies and sports they enjoy, and they
have forms of entertainment they like to watch. In fact, many of them also
report in surveys that they enjoy their jobs even though the jobs don't pay
enough or have decent benefits. (And as of late 2005, 93% of individuals
earning over $50,000 a year describe themselves as "doing well.") They also
understand that they have some hard-won democratic rights and freedoms
inherited from the past that are much more than people in many other
countries have. They don't want to see those positive aspects messed up.
..."


 The key lessons here for us are that, while media is critical to
> communication and motivation, engagement and participatory activity are
> critical to sustaining that motivation. And this can be difficult when your
> objectives are very large in scale and/or distant in time. With space
> advocacy this is exacerbated by unrealistic expectations and that basic and
> ubiquitous lack of knowledge about how things work in the real world. That
> delusion that anything short of starting the construction of the first
> starship in your back yard is irrelevant. We have to stop pretending there
> are magical shortcuts, because there aren't. We need to accept that space
> development is the work of civilizations and lifetimes, need to be
> realistic
> about what we can actually do in the near-term, and seek the fun, personal
> accomplishment/empowerment, and larger benefits to society that can be
> found
> along that path, not just at the finish line.
>

I agree we need more coherent alternatives.

But here is a simple one... Why not just build a new town somewhere on
Earth, like the middle of upstate New York, ideally near a train line,
converting some land to a nice eco-city-like development for 50,000 people?
Just make it a nice place to live, with walkable streets, a tech shop, a
homeschool resource center, high bandwidth, renewable energy, a great
library, maybe personal mass transit, and so on. Or rebuild Braddock, PA,
instead. Or help improve another place. Anyway, if those things are still
beyond us, how are we going to build space habitats? One step at a time. See
the picture here, interpretable as (among other things) people building a
new village as a step towards building a new space habitat:
 http://www.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)."

I think a successful TMP etc. movement has to blend both the present Earthly
issues and the future space/ocean/metaverse issues...

Still, I'd agree more videos would help. But rather than celebrate one
particular project like TMP, it might help more to present very basic issues
about abundance, technology, the resources in the universe, and so on. As I
suggest here:
 "Specific consciousness raising points for short videos?"
 http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/msg/eff0aa5033106bb5


 I have been working on
> this myself for many years and have spent a lot of my own money on it. But
> I'm just one person living alone in the desert -literally
>

Anyway, I hear your plea. I know how it feels (replace desert with forest,
at the moment). I think it is a big challenge to think what we, as
individuals, can realistically do to further some good causes without
spinning our wheels and getting nothing done. The general advice is "Think
globally, act locally, plan modestly", and to find something that:
* Advances the project and otherwise does no big harm;
* You like;
* You are good at or want to become good at;
* Is approachable in reasonable chunks to create a sense of flow;
* The world needs;
* The world will pay for (sales, grants, loans, donations, whatever) or is
so cheap to do that you can do it anyway on the side;
* Is feasible with the resources you have access too (including by
advocating for more if you are good at it);
* Ideally, lets you be part of some group or can be approached in some
collective way (that is, not focused on secrecy or proprietary or some other
isolating approach).

Find intersections of all those is great when it happens. The less all those
things fit together, the more distress there is pursuing the project.

There is also a central problem that the people good at lobbying socially
for resources often have the exact opposite personality it takes to make
good use of resources technically. :-) Which is why Michael Philips says (in
the Seven Laws of Money) most granting agencies fail to accomplish anything.

I struggle with finding those combination in my own life. And sometimes come
up with half-baked compromises I'm not very proud of and find ultimately
demotivating, like this time-limited "artificial scarcity" approach: :-)
 http://www.artificialscarcity.com/
 http://www.musicalphrases.com/

Anyway, all that is in the context of greater learning, greater thinking on
all this. I still think there are obvious gaps as a far as a tool to help
make sense of manufacturing webs in an open public way, as well as thinking
through socioeconomic issues. I think I have a better handle on them with
the four (or five) economies, but I think there is a lot of content that
could be made on these basic things:
 http://peswiki.com/index.php/OS:Economic_Transformation

Anyway, it is easy to get lost in advocating one specific thing that you
know is good based on lots of past thinking. But to present useful stuff to
the public, maybe it makes sense to go way back to the basics, and talk
about them? Why is TMP possible? What basics about the universe (like
abundance and technological possibilities) do you understand (and why) that
the average person might need to know to accept something like TMP as a good
idea? I mean, here we have the entire population being frightened (possibly
to death by irony) by fears about Peak Oil, and there TMP is, saying we can
have trillions of people living in space (which I agree with the TMP there).
What bridges the gap? If you can get at that basic thing via an educational
video, maybe you can plant a seed that will sprout later?


 Everyone in this group needs to
> cultivate a working knowledge of the basics of mechanics, electronics,
> computing, software, the principles of propulsion, the principles of energy
> production, the families of fabrication methods, and the families of
> building systems.
>

Nice, but everyone has their own strengths and weaknesses. Everyone has what
they can contribute. You earlier said something about the importance of
artists and filmmakers, as well as people to create events. There may be
little overlap there with mechanical skill. A community may have lots of
different personalities representing lots of different skill sets...


 A program of public education in science, technology, and
> industry to cultivate industrial literacy globally. That's a critical
> aspect
> of TMP's Foundation efforts toward cultural development.
>

I agree, and I'm not against learning the basics, though despite my previous
comment. As I wrote above on videos, I think you really have to reach people
on that basic level at this point, to move them beyond Peak Oil fears. But
it's one thing to see the basics as educational, "here is what is possible",
as opposed to skill-oriented, as in "and now we're going to turn you into a
machinist/designer to build a space ship" (as important as it is that some
people can build stuff that really works, but then see my point about
hundreds of billions of US dollars a year already spent on that and it being
misdirected). In the same way, I think it would be great if everyone learned
a little programming and electronics to understand the basics (the lower
level the better in some ways), but I don't expect most people are going to
have the interest in spending decades full-time learning to build quality
software. Likewise, sure, as you suggest it would be great if everyone
learned something about gardening, but that does not mean everyone is going
to want to have a big garden.

Maybe there is room for another space academy themed school in your local
area somehow? Not that I'm big on compulsory schooling... It could just be a
space themed resource center for schools, homeschoolers, and other
interested people?

Anyway, the greater the ambition, the more I'd also suggest going virtual.
You could create, in an open way, 3D models of all these things in a
simulation. Then your publicity videos become screen captures from the
working simulation... Anyway, with programming skills, that's how I see it.

Somehow, we need to team up more. :-) I just wish I had more time for all
this.

Imagine, hypothetically, I help provide a computing/simulation
infrastructure, and you provide a lot of 3D content that a community keeps
refining? Although even there, here is a big hurdle: how do we simulate this
stuff in a useful way? So, out of the gate, there is not an obvious solution
and it becomes a research project... Anyway, it might become like a working
"thingiverse" where the objects were in use in a simulated environment and
you could also grab the files under a free license and print them at home. I
know that is not what you aspire to though, because it focuses more on the
virtual.

Also, then you have to ask, how is this different from the space-themed
MMORPGs that are out there like Eve Online?
 http://www.eveonline.com/

I think there are differences, but one has to think them through.

Also, it's not clear to me how exactly aspects of sensemaking about
manufacturing interact with issues of a shared simulation space (where the
whole thing is constantly changing and improving). One can organize
information without a simulation and without a laboratory. But they will all
work best interacting together. But, that is sort of what happens in real
life. Look at how Eve Online is teaching people about banking as a
confidence game. :-)
http://news.softpedia.com/news/Eve-Online-Economy-Suffers-700-billion-ISK-Scam-33737.shtml


 Establish a prototype testbed outpost in the Atacama Desert managed by
> Internet. This will be a fully functional outpost free of human
> intervention
> except at special 'drop points'.
>

The Mars Society has been doing this... There is Open Luna too. We need a
way for these organizations to work together. But that was: :-)
 http://www.openvirgle.net/
"OpenVirgle's mission is, first and foremost, the consolidation of
information. There are many pro-space-settlement groups out there, each with
great ideas. The problem is, they are all competitive for funding, and they
can't seem to agree on space settlement tactics and technologies. We will
attempt to bring together all of these ideas and all of this information,
and put it all up for proper comparison and discussion. Hopefully, future
groups, or future iterations of OpenVirgle ourselves, will be able to use
this collected knowledge to "put our eggs into a few more baskets" than just
Earth.
 We hope to end a history of secrecy and paranoia surrounding high
technology development, and bring us all together towards a larger shared
purpose, pooling resources and sharing the benefits of our combined work
with the entirety of the human race. Yes, it's idealistic, but all the best
grassroots efforts are, and if you don't shoot for the stars, you will never
leave the planet."

We could use better tools for that, as well as using the tools we have in
better ways to grapple with all that content in an open way.

I checked in some code here about three years ago to that end, and have been
working on related stuff since on-and-off:
 http://code.google.com/p/openvirgle/source/browse/trunk

Anyway, I think doing a lot of this virtually lowers the bar enough that
some gets done (you can have virtual conferences, for example). However, I
know that just won't appeal the same way to hands-on types. And that's
unfortunate. It's just an issue of resources. Ideally we'd have
future-oriented hands-on technology centers everywhere.
 "Build 21000 flexible fabrication facilities across the USA "
 http://pcast.ideascale.com/a/dtd/44897-8319


 So there it is folks. This is our plan to get TMP started, presented in
> order of what I think is the most to least immediately accessible activity.
>

Anyway, individuals can only do so much. So, it's important to prioritize.
Which three items on that list you made are most important? The first three?
Wiki, book, Art and CGI models? They could all fit into a virtual approach.
How could we at least create a virtual TMP world that people could visit?
And where it could have increasing levels of realism over time as it got
improved? And where it was linked somehow to at least 3D printing with
RepRap, MakerBot, Fab at Home (and maybe subtractive machining too, like with
ShopBot "Desktop", which I aspire to get someday. :-) I had not realized
there was a small version of ShopBot until just the other day (though pricey
and more for real production than tinkering with the thing itself):
 http://www.shopbottools.com/mProducts/desktop.htm

Anyway, as I said at an SSI conference a decade ago:
 http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/SSI_Fernhout2001_web.html
"At this moment nearly every engineer on earth has a powerful and globally
networked computer in his or her home. Collaborative volunteer efforts are
now possible on an unprecedented scale. Moores's Law predicts continued
reductions (see for example the writings of Raymond Kurzweil at
http://www.kurzweilai.net/ or Hans Moravec at http://www.frc.ri.cmu.edu/~hpm)
in the cost of bandwidth, storage, CPU power, and displays - which will lead
to computers a million times faster, bigger or cheaper in the next few
decades. Collaboration software such as for sending email, holding real-time
video conferences, and viewing design drawings is also reducing in cost;
much of it is now effectively free. This means there are now few technical
or high-cost barriers to cooperation among engineers, many of whom even now
have in their homes (often merely for game playing reasons) computing power
and bandwidth beyond anything available to the best equipped engineers in
the 1970s.
 However, the internet is already littered with abandoned collaborative
projects. Productive collaboration requires more than technology; it
requires the sustained energy of many positive contributions and
interactions, which arise from common goals and mutual trust. The refinement
of commonly shared purposes and principles takes time and work. Intellectual
property licensing is often overlooked, primarily because collaborators
would rather be working toward a common goal than arguing legal issues. An
appropriate licensing strategy based on a shared purpose and principles
helps to build and maintain trust and promote spontaneous participation. But
there are many licensing options, each with compelling arguments for its
use, making it difficult for collaborators to choose the best licensing
strategy for their needs. In the long term, these issues can make or break a
collaborative effort. It is our hope that more spontaneous productive
collaboration will occur if the entire space-settlement community is better
informed on these issues. ...
 We believe that thousands of individuals (such as the people at this
conference) are ready and willing to make compromises in their own lives to
nurture the space settlement dream at the grassroots level - but in a more
direct way than has been attempted thus far. In particular, individuals
could collaborate on the iterative development of detailed space habitat
designs and simulations using nothing more than the computers they already
have at home for playing games. While excellent progress has been made on
the general engineering design of space habitats (in terms of basic physics
and proof-of-concept projects), many of the details remain to be worked out.
There have been individual attempts in some of these areas (e.g., the SSI
Matrix effort), but a persistent collaborative community has not yet
coalesced around constructing a comprehensive and non-proprietary library of
such details.
 What sort of things could such a far-flung collaboration produce? We
envision a collaboratively developed and universally available library
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak of detailed CAD files, simulations and
scenarios that describe the required manufacturing processes, products and
machines, ecological web management practices, and means for bootstrapping
space settlements from asteroidal, lunar, or Martian ore. For example, such
a library could form the knowledge component of a self-replicating space
habitat system capable of duplicating itself from asteroidal ores and
sunlight like a huge algae cell in space, such as was envisioned by J.D.
Bernal in the 1920s.
 One reason more cooperation on such a library hasn't happened to date is
that the various societies people support have (seemingly) very different
objectives. For example, numerous space-settlement related efforts (such as
SSI, the Mars Society http://www.marssociety.org, the Living Universe
Foundation http://www.luf.org, PERMANENT http://www.permanent.com, and the
Artemis Project http://www.asi.org) each have a different approach towards
space settlement. Since so many bright people want similar things, the
question arises of how we can work together to help all of these projects
develop. 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."

Anyway, I still think that challenge awaits. :-)

Sadly, I myself have not proven up to it so far. :-( Often I have gotten
lost in infrastructure issues, and while there, the world has passed me by
(like with RDF instead of the Pointrel system).

But, in any case, we are seeing this happen. But not so much with one group,
but more with emerging standards of data exchange, of spreading knowledge,
of common practices, of a variety of hubs (thingiverse, makezine,
Appropedia, SKDB, GitHub, etc.).. So, stuff is happening. It just not is so
centralized. That just seems the nature of how this stuff happens on the
internet. Still, could there be a little more focus, probably yes. :-) But,
then the question is, maybe we should focus more on making the Earth work
well for everyone over the next decade, especially given the overlap with
learning how to live in space? Still, I like the space challenge, because it
makes you really think hard about supporting human life when you can't take
the natural biosphere for granted... And it makes you think hard about
things like social dynamics of small communities in a space settlement.
Space habitats are an interesting lens from which to view the human
condition. But they are not the only lens. Ideally, one can find a way to
overlap all this.

That's why the OSCOMAK proposal said: "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." All three.
History buffs, real right-now needs people, and future-oriented people. All
time perspectives.

See also:
 "RSA Animate - The Secret Powers of Time "
 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A3oIiH7BLmg

And orienting those time perspectives towards engaging in various ways with
the 21st century we are living in:
 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AC7ANGMy0yo
 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc
 http://johncr8on.com/projects/21st-century-institutions/

Anyway, wish I had more time to do that all myself. Including a little local
group of apprentices and a workshop. But I don't. But I can still do what
little I can.

And then I just circle back to needing better tools for organizing
information and communicating about it, and then using those tools to design
better infrastructures. By itself, that seems like a huge task. And we of
course already have such tools in various forms. But, we also have
productive machinery and rockets and so on in various forms. How does one
take part in that process of redesign, of improvement, of expansion
according to values, or re-examining the past values with an eye to present
needs and future possibilities? It is a life-long task... I seem to forget
about old tools at about the rate I am learning about new ones these days,
there is so much going on... And then when is the time to use them?

If I'd say one thing though, in summary, it is, don't assume that people
understand the most basic things you assume, like abundance is possible in
the universe. You may need to get that point across before people might be
receptive about the rest. Issues like how  much energy humanity uses
compared to how much power the sun puts out. And so on. From a Native
American perspective:
 http://www.marcinequenzer.com/creation.htm#The%20Field%20of%20Plenty
"The Field of Plenty is always full of abundance.  The gratitude we show as
Children of Earth allows the ideas within the Field of Plenty to manifest on
the Good Red Road so we may enjoy these fruits in a physical manner. When
the cornucopia was brought to the Pilgrims, the Iroquois People sought to
assist these Boat People in destroying their fear of scarcity. The Native
understanding is that there is always enough for everyone when abundance is
shared and when gratitude is given back to the Original Source. The trick
was to explain the concept of the Field of Plenty with few mutually
understood words or signs. The misunderstanding that sprang from this lack
of common language robbed those who came to Turtle Island of a beautiful
teaching. Our "land of the free, home of the brave" has fallen into taking
much more than is given back in gratitude by its citizens. Turtle Island has
provided for the needs of millions who came from lands that were ruled by
the greedy. In our present state of abundance, many of our inhabitants have
forgotten that Thanksgiving is a daily way of living, not a holiday that
comes once a year."

Off to a historical society board meeting. :-)

I've set up Google Apps for them (sad as it is centralized and subject to
Google oversight -- but it is sort of tradeoff of the risk of Big Brother
vs. the risk of lack of community in the context of my own limited time).
I'm not 100% certain we will keep it. I was toying with GitHub as an
alternative. :-) Or something else. But I also don't want to make them that
dependent on me. Even as Google Apps has warts, and even just Drupal on a
shared host might have been good enough (but not "free" as in cost, and they
are a recognized 501-c-3 non-profit and so get Google Apps for education as
a free upgrade).

Anyway, I wrote a long email about working with historical societies for the
list months ago, but never sent it, related to my time perspective posts.
There is a lot of "historical" interest in making things. Why not also
figure out a way to connect TMP ideal to historical societies? Even if you
don't, just thinking about things from that perspective may help give you
new insights into what TMP could be about, as well as how to do it in the
context of the complex subsistence/gift/planned/exchange/parasitical
economic system we have...

--Paul Fernhout
http://www.pdfernhout.net/
====
The biggest challenge of the 21st century is the irony of technologies of
abundance in the hands of those thinking in terms of scarcity.

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-- 
- Bryan
http://heybryan.org/
1 512 203 0507
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