From: Patrick Salsbury (salsbury_at_sculptors.com)
Date: 12/08/98
Message-Id: <3.0.3.32.19981208224530.00918384@mailhost.sculptors.com> Date: Tue, 08 Dec 1998 22:45:30 -0500 From: Patrick Salsbury <salsbury_at_sculptors.com> Subject: Getting the city afloat, and some future goals of Reality Sculptors
At 01:39 PM 11/20/98 -0500, you wrote:
>Aquaculture will be a significant resource for the upcoming generations.
>Protein is expected to be a severe scarcity in the next ten years. World
>population doubling by 2050, expected world resource fisheries expected
>to be overfished by 2005, world energy use increasing steadily and carbon
>emissions being restricted at a steady rate actually equal a pretty big
>opportunity for the right individuals and the right project. I am in DC
>now, and have just completed a seminar given by the World Resources
>Institute, well attended by the likes of Dupont, GM, Ford, Hewlet
>Packard, IBM, Motorola, and others who have been doing surprising things
>that reduce their costs, improve customer value, and -Oh Yeah, happen to
>save serious amounts of resources and toxic emissions. It is being spun
>as a win-win situation - as it should be. WRI is at www.wri.org and there
>is a lot of interesting information in their recent publication 'The
>Next Bottom Line'. The upshot of this is that people like Barbara Marx
>Hubbard (progenitor of the concept of deterministic evolution and self
>initiating "pods" of interdependent individuals working for success and
>change) and Kirby Urner (mathemetician and scholar on synergetics who is
>trying to form a large scale resource for disaster relief utilizing
>Buckminster Fuller's housing principles and an interconnected resource
>for mavericks to create change) and the wide spectrum of free thinkers
>that are ready to let slip the bonds of social convention in favour of
>social invention (such as the floating cities group) are more than ready
>to take the step to their potential reality (myself included).
I've just sent a note to Kirby, as I agree that we've been pursuing
parallel tracks, and it makes sense to me to try and collaborate, rather
than duplicate work.
>Hewlett
>Packard was a major grantor to the Monterey Bay Aquarium. The arguments
>for corporate donation (not domination) are bolstered by the positive
>things that I saw and heard at this conference.
Yes, Packard did a great thing for the Aquarium. He donated $55 million as
a one-time grant to get them going. They've been going strong and growing
ever since.
I think our avenue might be with MBARI, the Monterrey Bay Aquarium
Research Institute. They do a lot of the technical research & development
for the aquarium. I'd like to get some go-ahead to do some small
electrodeposition experiments. Really, all I need is someplace with a
constant supply of seawater and electricity. And with solar cells, I can
get the electricity from elsewhere. It'd just be nice to have a place where
I could check the meshes without having to don a wetsuit and swim 1/2 mile
out in the ocean to see what's happening. :-)
>I will be attending
>another soon on international use of effective technology, where I will
>be watching for opportunities to relay our desire for the floating city
>project.
What conference, and where? Let us know how it goes! I'm a member of the
World Future Society, and have been contemplating their event next summer.
I can't really think of good reasons NOT to go, so perhaps I'd better start
planning... :-)
>It has some very sound application to world needs. 1 Mobile
>platform for population relocation. 2 Food source that does not deplete
>land based resources. 3 Energy production. 4 Sequestration of carbon
>(another interesting aspect of the future of business if we can work it
>out - selling Carbon units to wasteful industry can be quite lucrative
>and will probably move on to the national level, wherein carbon units can
>be sold to countries) 5 Desalination - as water supplies dwindle, coastal
>residents will increasingly turn to effective means of water production -
>local communities will be less willing to invest in infrastructure than
>purchasing water outright. 6 and not least important rebuilding of coral
>reefs. The accretion technology can assist the rebuilding of diseases and
>dying reef bioregions which Florida is currently experiencing. A report
>will be out soon highlighting the impending disaster.
A side note on desalination: Aside from the fact that we can grab
boatloads (literally!) of salt from the ocean, as well as the water, I've
seen some data recently that there are commercial (diesel-powered) systems
that run desalination and can pull 500 CUBIC METERS of freshwater per day.
They heat the water, while at the same time reduce the air pressure in the
evaporation chamber (presumably with large vacuum pumps) which lowers the
vaporization pressure so that the water vaporizes (boils) at around 50C
rather than 100C. I hadn't considered this aspect before, but it's
perfectly obvious. Geodesics would be a natural and strong way to build
large evaporation chambers. I was planning to do so, anyway, and draw off
the water-laden air to pipe through atmospheric condensers. Reducing the
air pressure inside is just one more detail, and would probably yield great
quantities of water.
>It might be a good
>time to get a test project underway. Got those science notebooks
>together? Let's make a proposal to the EPA, Fish and Game, or the
>Government of Florida. Maybe Disneyworld would be interested in an ocean
>world... BUT can we draft a charter that outlines some goals and hopes? I
>personally hope that GAMBLING will not be used as a revenue source as in
>Louisiana. How about a purposefully vague but spiritually strong
>statement of intention? Where are we on this project? Where is the
>collecting point for information ?
I think that gambling is probably something we should avoid at first, or
people might not take us seriously. (I personally have no problem with it
once we're established, and it's a great way of making lots of money. Just
look at Las Vegas or Monaco...)
The collecting point should probably be here, and on the website. (Again,
I can make space available for anyone who wants to start organizing some
segment of this.) All posts here are archived, and sometime, (in my copious
amounts of free time! ;^) ) I'll try to arrange a searchable index. Don't
hold your breath for now, though.
Writing proposals is a good idea, but I think we should probably wait
until we've got some experimental data (i.e. - hulls or something we've
actually electrodeposited).
To be honest, I've gotten myself spread too thinly, and once I return from
this 4-week business trip, I plan on upgrading the servers, revamping the
website, etc. But there's never enough time in the day (or night.) If
you've got ideas for something you'd like to see or do, please let me know,
and we can work something out. I'm extremely happy that the Reality
Sculptors Project now has several hundred subscribers. It's just becoming a
bit difficult to manage, and I need to redo some of the infrastructure to
handle the data more intelligently, and scale as we grow to several thousand.
Ideally, I want to see it grow in a sort of loose, anarchic,
self-organizing fashion. I use the Linux Project as my model, and that's
now 8 million users strong, with thousands of developers working
independantly on all aspects of the Project...whatever they see fit to do,
or think needs to be done.
One of the prime communications tools is their USENET groups, and they
also run a bevy of mailing lists. (I've got the lists down, and can more
with about 30 seconds of work, as we get more interest.) I'm going to set
up mail<->news gateways, eventually, so that we can begin to feed the info
out on the Usenet channels, to those who are interested. I think it's a
great way to get to some of the creative minds in universities who are
looking for something to do, or trying to find their path.
There's a whole lot to get done. I've got a whiteboard full of "to do"
stuff on my wall at home. All reasonable offers to help will be gratefully
accepted. (Although not necessarily in a timely fashion! I'm still several
weeks behind in answering mail! Ach!)
Anyway, enough bellyaching. That's a bit more of the general
architecture/design of the RSP, and where I'd like to take it. Where would
YOU like to see it go?
Pat
___________________Think For Yourself____________________
Patrick G. Salsbury - http://reality.sculptors.com/~salsbury/
Check out the Reality Sculptors Project: http://reality.sculptors.com/