Replied: Sun, 05 Sep 1999 04:08:29 -0700 Replied: domesteading@sculptors.com From domesteading-request@sculptors.com Thu Jul 15 01:19:48 1999 Received: from bucky.sculptors.com (list@bucky.sculptors.com [209.157.90.233]) by bootstrap.sculptors.com (8.8.7/8.8.7) with ESMTP id BAA09888; Thu, 15 Jul 1999 01:19:44 -0700 Received: (from list@localhost) by bucky.sculptors.com (8.8.7/8.8.7) id AAA18520; Thu, 15 Jul 1999 00:53:22 -0700 Resent-Date: Thu, 15 Jul 1999 00:53:22 -0700 X-Authentication-Warning: bucky.sculptors.com: list set sender to domesteading-request@sculptors.com using -f Message-Id: <199907150753.AAA08993@bootstrap.sculptors.com> To: domesteading@sculptors.com Subject: Re: Autonomous housing...and how to sever the last umbilical? In-Reply-To: Your message of "Wed, 14 Jul 1999 00:11:28 -0000." <19990714.005541.4238.1.c.knight@juno.com> Date: Thu, 15 Jul 1999 00:53:12 -0700 From: Patrick Salsbury Resent-Message-ID: Resent-From: domesteading@sculptors.com X-Mailing-List: archive/latest/909 X-Loop: domesteading@sculptors.com Precedence: list Resent-Sender: domesteading-request@sculptors.com Reply-To: domesteading@sculptors.com > > Not having neighbors to try and impress is a wonderfully > >freeing thing. I hope you all can try it when we get these autonomous > >dwellings into production. :-) > > Pat (et al), I was going through my old archived messages, and came > across this statement, from you. Autonomous dwellings, put into > production. You obviously had something in mind. Please, expand > on this thought...if you still remember it! :-) > > (It's from the old "terraforming terra" thread) Heh. It's obvious Chuck doesn't know me very well, yet. "If I still remember it" is a bit of an understatement. (In fact, if you ask my friends, get a couple of beers into me, and it's all I talk about! ;^) ) Ok. Once more, for the record, and the benefit of newcomers to the list: I want to build houses. Piles and piles of houses. Hundreds of millions of houses, in all honesty. I base my ideas for housing upon some of the same principles that made car technology triumph over railroads, that made radio overtake the telegraph, and that makes the internet so very difficult to shut down or censor. Namely: decentralized architecture. The idea is simple: Rather than designing everything around a centralized system, with central power plants, water-treatment plants, sewer systems, gas lines, phone lines, TV cable, and the attendent spiderweb of wires and pipes that those use, I envision a completely self-contained bubble-house, which allows one to cut free of the various umbilical cords of current society, and live anywhere on this planet's land surface. (Eventually, also the sea surface, under the sea, and then the Moon, Mars, and elsewhere, but that's getting a bit ahead of things. The first trick is to design one that works anywhere on THIS planet.) The basic design is that of a geodesic sphere. Perhaps a flattened ellipsoid, or maybe even something else. But it's a strong shell that shelters you from the elements. Insulated walls. Solar & Wind power, along with fuel-cells, methane-digesters hooked up to composting toilets, water-reprocessing facilities in the house, a hydroponic greenhouse, wireless communications, etc. It catches rainwater, and/or pumps & purifies from nearby lakes, streams, & rivers, or even condenses water directly from the atmosphere. It's actually more useful to think of this thing as a spaceship than a house. It's meant to help you survive in the various extremes of this planet. I just don't want to muck around with engines and flight aerodynamics and lots of rocket fuel, so it's more like a stationary base-camp, which can be picked up by helicopter and delivered to any GPS coordinates required. This does bring to mind one question, though. J. Baldwin (author of "BuckyWorks") posed this one to me recently at a conference, and I don't yet have a good answer: "How do you sever the last umbilical? How do you get rid of the need for roads?" It's a good question. We can make self-contained power systems, and water, food, communication, etc. That's all pretty easy, actually. But what about getting to & fro? What about going to work? What about driving to town for some supplies? Or dropping the kids off for school or a ballgame? Yes, we could try air-cars, whenever they finally get here. But as J. points out, they're noisy as hell, and you need to be a pilot to fly them. (Hence the autopilot mailing list I run. If you're interested in helping on autopilot issues, join that list.) Any thoughts on this would be greatly appreciated. I'm not sure how to get around the roads issue at this point, and with roads come lots of ecological problems. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ OK. Back to houses... There are currently about 400,000,000 people homeless on Earth. They project another 400,000,000 by around the year 2030. That means that if we started today, producing 10,000,000 houses per year, (That's 27,397 houses per day, if we also work on Christmas!) then we won't hold even. It would take 40 years to house today's 400,000,000 homeless at that rate, and we'll have replaced them in less time than that! That, in plain numbers, is the real problem. There's an AWFUL lot of work to do. Not everyone is going to want, or be able to afford, the kind of house I, personally, want to live in. I actually have several different designs in mind, for everything from "disaster/war victim who's just had their entire world destroyed around them" to "just graduated from college, looking to get a first home and start a family" to "upscale yuppie, looking to escape the 'burbs and live in comfort on some large plot of land they just bought." There are many ways of addressing solutions, but there's still really just the one huge problem: Not all people have the technology and means to live their lives well. Many people I talk with about this jump to the same (incorrect) conclusion: that I think everyone in the world should live in one of my domes. Not by a long-shot. (I'm having enough trouble figuring out how to make 10 million per year, much less worrying about 6 billion!) Mainly, I want to provide appropriate tech for people, so they can move up their own personal standard-of-living ladder. So someone who has no house would probably appreciate even a cardboard or Corrulite dome shelter. Quick & easy, and a step up...for them. Yuppies from a major city wouldn't be tempted by a cardboard dome. No chance. But something with 2-4 times the floorspace, at 1/5-1/10th the cost of a standard house, and more privacy than they've ever had in a city, no utility bills, their own garden, great views, and still in touch with the communications net...that might be interesting to them. There are many different ways of designing solutions, for many different folks in the world. Which ways most interest you? What would you like to work on? The Reality Sculptors Project is for getting together talented minds to discuss issues like this. If some of you decide to focus on an area, and want a branch area or list to work on it, let me know. If you want to help build the website, let me know. If you have pictures in your head, or chunks of code, or skills with CAD/CAM or 3D Modelling, or drawings you want to scan in for the website, or are good with teaching kids, or want to develop curricula for schools to teach them about the future, then let me know. I'm really good at setting up the infrastructure for people to move forward with these things. And getting all of you working together is exactly why I'm building this site, and these lists. One thing's certain. I can't build 10,000,000 houses per year on my own. It's going to take hundreds of thousands of us. We're going to have to form a company/group/whatever that's bigger than AT&T. It's going to be a lot of work. I think it will also be a lot of fun. :-) > > Also, has anyone on this list ever played around with geodesic > construction, using materials *other* than the traditional "stick" > framed construction? Panel domes would be a good example, > or fly's eye domes (my personal favorite) would be even better. > > -- Chuck Knight > Yep. We built a Corrulite dome here last year, which was a prototype of the emergency-shelter systems we'd like to produce and bring to disaster areas. This is a mod of a design we did in college using cardboard panels. And I think it was Tony Kalenak (sp?) who posted pics of his cardboard panel dome last year. Not only would these make great disaster relief, but also good play-domes for kids. A great way to get them used to the idea. (So, who wants to join the "Kids List", or whatever we call it, for figuring out new ways of teaching children how to solve global problems?) There are some pictures of the Corrulite dome building party online at: http://reality.sculptors.com/~salsbury/Gifs/Domes/party/ Yeah, I still haven't built a proper web page for those, and yeah, it was almost exactly a year ago. (7/18/1998) I'm looking into how to do something like that now. There's a good housing contest/project coming up to help the people of Kosovo which JMR just pointed me to. Check out http://www.archforhumanity.com/ for details. I'll also forward JMR's article here, if it didn't make it to the list. (I'll double-check my records.) -------------------------------------------------------------------- OK. So there's a bit more of the vision. Like I said, once I get started, I get a bit long-winded. And I didn't even have any beer tonight! :-) Any and all feedback & discussion is welcome. Please post your thoughts here. Pat ___________________Think For Yourself____________________ Patrick G. Salsbury - http://reality.sculptors.com/~salsbury/ Check out the Reality Sculptors Project: http://reality.sculptors.com/ --------------------------------------------------------- || loka samastha sukhino bhavanthu || "May all beings in all the worlds have peace and happiness."