Open Source Blueprints for Civilization!

[MasterNetra]

The Video:
http://www.ted.com/talks/marcin_jakubowski.html

"Using wikis and digital fabrication tools, TED Fellow Marcin Jakubowski is open-sourcing the blueprints for 50 farm machines, allowing anyone to build their own tractor or harvester from scratch. And that's only the first step in a project to write an instruction set for an entire self-sustaining village ..."

If you for some reason you can't play it like me, try downloading it. The amusing thing with that is you most likely end up playing it instead or at least that's how it is for me.

Their website:
http://openfarmtech.org

[tgalati4]

Neat idea, except it creates another problem: overpopulation.

[Tibuda]

Neat idea, except it creates another problem: overpopulation.

how?

[CreativeReach]

definitly looking in to this! I am a DIY Engineer type.

[earthpigg]

Neat idea, except it creates another problem: overpopulation.

my solution, in their shoes, would be to put documentation up pointing out that it takes 100 acres of meat-producing farmland to generate the same vitamins and calories and whatnot as 10 acres dedicated to plants (legumes, veggies, wheat, etc). [citation needed] <-- i can google some citations if anyone really wants. or you can do it yourself, this isn't a support thread. :P


similar to the Ubuntu approach - make the proprietary stuff available, but make it clear why it is preferable to use Free Software when practical.

(i do eat meat, for the record, and have much proprietary software installed on my Ubuntu system.)

[lhtown]

Earthpigg,

Take a look into permaculture ideas and you will find that meat can be raised responsibly, at least as far as land use and care is concerned.

In particular, Bill Mollison details how it isn't an either/or proposition of plants or meat, and how it can be a synergistic combination.

And yeah, I'm going to look up this open source ecology stuff.

[tgalati4]

Studies have shown that digging wells in Africa provides clean drinking water--which is good. What happens then is the population around the well grows and now you have a larger, poor population that can't feed itself. This larger, starving population then has more medical issues which need to be addressed.

So, although digging wells is a good idea, it has unintended consequences. I think Open Farmville is a neat idea, but it may lead to unintended consequences--such as overpopulation. Of course, it might also create sustainable populations--as that is the premise for the project. And it may work better in practice than in theory--like wikipedia. "No way can you have the public edit an encyclopedia." And yet wikipedia grows and gets better all the time.

Remember OLAP--one laptop per child? "Preposterous, no way can you make a $100 laptop." The real problem turned out to be Microsoft, Intel, and the textbook publishing cartel. Microsoft got spooked that 3rd World children would learn something other than Windows--so they discounted "Starter XP" for $3. Intel got spooked that millions of machines would use ARM or some no-name processor to power OLAP. So they muscled their way into the netbook world. The textbook cartel got spooked that electronic textbooks would replace the expensive paper books that these companies sell to Education Ministries. A little lobbying and these same Ministries now specify Windows-based, Intel-powered netbooks for their grade school children. And the textbook cartel continues to sell paper textbooks.

So I applaud the Global Village Construction Set. I would like to see a reality TV series that shows this stuff in action.