Posts by Nphyx

Open source team creates apocalypse survival kit

The 3d printer is a reprap. It is credited on their site and in many of their talks. It's not "rebranded", reprap is an open-source device so it doesn't have a "brand". They use a couple of other open source hardware projects as well - for instance, the multimachine. They're not out to reinvent the wheel, they're just out to unpatent it where necessary.

You don't need a paper making machine or a printing press to build a civilization capable of making a paper making machine or a printing press. You'll note they also don't have espresso machines, personal massagers, or many other lovely and useful devices on the list that we'd all like to have access to; that is because the machines that *are* on the list are what you need in order to manufacture those items (and, more importantly, other machines that can automate the manufacturing process for you).

Eh, they do have a plow. Among other things. But it's not actually an "apocalypse survival kit", that's just some silly crap the author of the article made up. The target scenario is a third-world/undeveloped village or other off-the-grid, remote location looking to bootstrap into a modern industrial society without borrowing billions from the IMF - not a cozy stretch of farmland in Kansas where the zombies can't get you. Of course the tools have plenty of applications outside the target, as open source things tend to.

Uh yeah they thought of that. Several of the machines are alternative-energy producers (wind, solar, biofuel). In fact the "power cube" that runs most of the machines (and is already designed, prototyped, tested and in production) is a flex-fuel device. But again, this isn't *actually* a post-apocalyptic thing, that's just some silly sensationalism on the part of the author.

The medical industry is pretty entrenched in politics. It'd be difficult to produce open-source medical supplies for legal reasons even if the technical problems were overcome. Nonetheless there are some quiet, speculative efforts out there to get going on it (for instance my good friends over at Broken Sidewalk Farm are sketching out plans for open-source insulin production). I think we'll see more space for open-source biotech in a few decades if the legal environment catches up with the technological capability.

Well, you and I may have different ideas about what is wrong with what we have now, but OSE solves many of the systemic problems that I see - unsustainable energy, tight coupling, open-ended resource management (as opposed to closed-loop), intellectual "property". The key component to a better society is better people, though, and no machines I've heard of can make people better. They have to choose to do that on their own. (Doesn't stop us from being selective about the company we keep, though)

Yes, you can probably plant 100 seedlings in a day. But if you have a machine that can do that, you can plant 100 seedlings in a day while reading through your backlog of Whole Earth Catalog issues. The point of machine tools isn't to do things that humans can't do; it's not even really to do things better than humans can do (for instance artisan craftsmanship trumps industrial manufacturing processes). The point is to do things so that humans can do other things that are less tedious.

Humanity has survived without a backyard brick maker for a long time. But before we had modern industrial infrastructure we did have backyard brick makers. We just usually called them "slaves". Bricks are an essential terrain- and environment-independent building material. If you have dirt, you can build CEBs. Any human village on earth that does not have access to modern building materials or a wealth of natural resources builds with brick. The only scenario where you can't build a house with CEBs is the cold vacuum of space (or on top of the arctic ice cap, assuming there's any ice left up there). That's why they're useful in a kit that does not anticipate having access to modern construction materials.

Yeah But

Cute (and sensationalist) as "apocalypse survival kit" is, OSE is not about survival nuttery or Fallout fandom. It's about poverty relief and individual autonomy. It's not pie-in-the-sky, either; unlike certain other projects trying to upset the industrial order, it does not rely on science fiction or wishful thinking about human nature to work (*cough*Venus Project*cough*). It's an amazing project and I proudly contribute to it. Criticism of your framing of the project aside, I am happy to see it getting some press coverage. :)

Also, the laser cutter is not at all far-fetched. There's already an open-source laser cutter fully funded and far into development (see:lasersaur). Neither is circuitboard printing (in fact, it's trivial to print circuitboards using toner transfer techniques and equally trivial to prepare circuitboard blanks for that purpose - we do it at my hackerspace all the time).

Re: building computers and gadgets, OSE has not set out to make every conceivable machine that has any place in a modern high-tech society, it's about making the basic components of industrial infrastructure available without the price markup and intellectual property obstacles presented by equivalent commercial products. The point is to bootstrap your way to developing more specialized devices as you need them.