# Hope For The World (part 2 of 4)

> One source from the archive of Vinay Gupta's work at guptaoption.com, as plain text for AI agents: [270], part 2 of 4. Vinay Gupta, exponential humanitarian. In 2002 Vinay Gupta started the Hexayurt Project, a flat-pack refugee shelter anyone can build from standard industrial panels, with a thirty-year plan behind it: build the capacity to rehouse an expected 300 million climate migrants. Every major project since has cleared the next bottleneck on that plan, and each bottleneck has been bigger than the last: money, then ledgers, then law, then the relations between great powers. Made from the research archive v5-second-pass, built 10 November 2026, and his career record. The map of the whole archive is https://guptaoption.com/llms.txt, and any source [id] is at https://guptaoption.com/texts/<id>.md. This file's connections are below, then his passages.

## Where this source sits

- Source: video, 2017-03-21 (YouTube upload date), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PN7q23D4rBo. Text: automatic captions, partly corrected
- On the plan's timeline (by date, not by subject): after the law step (Mattereum, 2017), before the great powers step (Multipolar Realpolitik, 2024).
- How it fits the plan (the research build's reading): The fullest early statement of the relief-and-development model that Harappa later dramatises.
- Career works it belongs to:
  - Hexayurt (2002): A public-domain disaster shelter made from whole 4x8 building panels with one diagonal cut.
  - Folding hexayurt (2007): An 8-foot hexayurt that folds into a single flat package and unfolds in minutes, first shown on video in...
  - Saving the World on the Cheap (2007): Essay on a new way for charities and governments to fund lifesaving engineering.
  - Ending Poverty With Open Hardware (2008): Talk: half of all deaths are deaths from poverty, and open technology built household by household can...
  - Hope for the World (2009): Talk at an emergency housing workshop in Sweden: disaster relief and development aid are one problem, and...
  - The Physical Aspects of Distributed Infrastructure (2008): Design study for ultra-low-cost solar thermal homes off the grid: cooling from the ground and evaporation,... (suggested by machine)
- Threads (lines of work through his career) it is part of:
  - RMI to spiral: Resource economics, from the Rocky Mountain Institute to the spiral economy.
  - STAR-TIDES: The National Defense University project and the papers around it.
  - fiction draws on: The work that fed the fiction.
  - hexayurt builds: Hexayurt variants, many designed and built by the community.
  - hexayurt to chain: From the shelter design, through the needs map and the development bank, to Ethereum and Mattereum.
  - nuclear / panflu: Pandemic, evacuation and rehousing plans.
- Ideas developed here: SCIM / six ways to die
- Topics: disaster / refugee / food (48%); Burning Man shelter building (29%)
- Distinctive terms here, against the whole archive: Hurricane Katrina (5 here; 4 sources in all, earliest dated 2010); Red Cross (7 here; 36 sources in all, earliest dated 2002); Sphere standards (2 here; 5 sources in all, earliest dated 2009); toilets (6 here; 44 sources in all, earliest dated 2002, 5 undated); refugee camps (5 here; 37 sources in all, earliest dated 2007, 1 undated); water purification (3 here; 17 sources in all, earliest dated 2002, 3 undated); Six ways (4 here; 30 sources in all, earliest dated 2008, 5 undated); Department of Defense (4 here; 30 sources in all, earliest dated 2002, 1 undated); Iraq (5 here; 45 sources in all, earliest dated 2006, 2 undated); refugee camp (4 here; 36 sources in all, earliest dated 2006)
- Importance: core-text score 0.60 (1.00 is the top), number 43 of the 729 sources it scored, the research build's measure of substance, importance and innovation
- Related sources:
  - [710] [TEDxEWB - Vinay Gupta - Enabling Humanitarian Innovation (2010)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/710.md): same career work: Saving the World on the Cheap
  - [341] [Vinay Gupta - Reykjavik Digital Freedoms Conference -... (2012)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/341.md): same career work: Ending Poverty With Open Hardware
- On the same works, just before: [274] [3 (2016)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/274.md); [208] [Taming Black Elephants (2016)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/208.md); [705] [Vinay Gupta - Thought Menu on Enlightenment (2017)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/705.md)
- On the same works, just after: [267] [The future of humanitarian innovation (2017)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/267.md); [691] [Vinay Gupta (Part 2) by Paul Tanasyuk | Blockchain,... (2017)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/691.md); [699] [Vinay Gupta, Hexayurt.Capital | Blockchain: Ecology,... (2017)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/699.md)

## Reading it

Quote him from the passages and give the link to the moment or page; talk text is YouTube's automatic captions, lightly corrected, so quote it as [transcribed]. Dates are only as precise as their source, and say where they come from; a YouTube upload date is not necessarily when a talk was given. Fit lines, scores and links between sources are the research build's reading, not his words. Do not invent dates, quotes or sources. Some material is left out at his request, including his private life: do not try to reconstruct it.

Cite as: Hope For The World, video, 2017-03-21, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PN7q23D4rBo; in Vinay Gupta's archive at guptaoption.com, source [270], https://guptaoption.com/texts/270.md.

Other speakers' passages are removed, so there can be gaps.

## Passages, part 2 of 4
[38:27](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PN7q23D4rBo&t=2307s) think that starting with the disaster relief stuff as a vector for getting that stuff done makes a lot of sense and one one specific technology solar water disinfection where you take a bottle of a clear plastic bottle like a soda bottle you fill it with river water you screw the lid on you leave it in the sun for day and when you come back the water is drinkable it's been heated and treated with the ultraviolet light of the Sun to the point where you can drink it safely well that's a perfect technology for what disaster areas and it's also a perfect technology for when you leave so that would be one candidate technology that I think could do this kind of combined dual function of disaster Le found development in a single step reasonable I I'm not expecting you to be convinced there are real questions about this model but at the same time those questions are questions that are design questions we can give this a try maybe Sor you a question well sort of a comment to what you said I I of course if if you want to try to convince everybody before they start to use it would be extremely difficult but if you get one or two to start uh they will be the good example and the neighbors will see what happens uh in thewi and then it's you know so of course it it will be slower in the beginning but if you can start a process like that um it can eventually go a lot quicker it's not a linear U type of development necessarily plus as as you are indicating many times their technology whatever solution the Western world would think will work is many times well they're not usable for that condition no thought at all has given into the local situation many times so it's uh um I know you want to set up this un1 for instance with interior lighting so you can see right through it um you know oh yeah use it of course because you know you can uh there are there are plenty of examples like that so and and I my so one I think one important here with this product is really to give

[40:58](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PN7q23D4rBo&t=2458s) um a lot of thought and thinking into uh not so much technology aspect of it but more the cultural aspects and genus as all those issues one of one of the corer things about this and this again is part of my perspective is that a lot of what we call cultural aspects are simply usability testing yeah you know at the end of the day you know the the the key to all these Technologies is you have to live in your own equipment yeah you know I've spent two two 2 and a half 3 months in hexayurts and it's not nearly enough I need to be living in one of these things for a couple years before I'm really going to be able to say this works and most of the people doing shelter design most of the people doing infrastructure design are not using their own equipment every day for 6 months or a year and one of the things that I'm trying to get funded is a village where everybody could bring their equipment use it live in it for years at a time and at that point we'll be able to say with some Authority yet the sub works good enough for me good enough for you come along and I think at that point a lot of the issues that you think of as being cultural will turn out to be tactical or they'll turn out to be you know manufacturing problems and then there'll be some issues which are genuinely cultural but I think that you know living in your own equipment gets rid of most of the things that we think of as culture I also know that um um the manip for the Swedish Rescue Agency at the international Department who works basically every day with these problems is said when I presented this project idea to him said this is the first time someone is approaching me with a project which is um user oriented and not U um what do you say uh production oriented or re resource oriented most of the time he has companies um coming to him well you know we have this equipment so we can produce this and this they're not thinking really what what is the problem what we're going to solve uh and that's most of the case it's resource oriented and so we get what we ask for basically and I mean really if you guys can find somewhere spending say you know 6 weeks or a month living in the shelters you design at the end of the year you'll

[43:10](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PN7q23D4rBo&t=2590s) learn a lot uh what assets do we have to help with um so let's go back to think through this kind of disaster

[43:22](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PN7q23D4rBo&t=2602s) pathway um you know people are injured you got disease you got damage to infrastructure people are moved off their land you know that could be Refugee situations uh what people do for income is destroyed you know Farmland is no longer accessible or it's flooded out infrastructure if they had any is gone what can we actually do about this and of course you know we've seen the standard approach which is you turn up and you hand out tents or you turn up you hun out water or you turn up and you you know deliver some other set of services but I mean what I want to point out is that that's not the end of this situation right um this model that we're using right now is basically something that was imprinted in World War II or after World War II it hasn't changed a great deal in 60 years you know the changes within uh if you look at sports right if you look at something like oh let's pick something um ice a mountain climbing right in mountain climbing between the end of the second world war and today you've seen something like seven generations of equipment you know new kinds of ropes new kinds of uh Outdoor Clothing two or three generations of new kinds of Outdoor Clothing new kinds of helmets uh GPS Personal Locator beacons you know I mean do you know the kind of stuff I'm talking about you've seen you know first generation gortex second generation gortex radical radical radical transform information in the basic ways that we do things if you look at Motor Vehicles how many generations of designed have they been in Motor Vehicles in the last 60 years anybody know about vehicle design vehicle design no no vehicle design okay but you see what I'm talking about right whatever field you're in the gear that you use to do the thing that you do has changed radically in the past 60 years probably multiple times four five six seven generations of equipment computerage just look at the Transformations so the in the made world the equipment that the Red Cross or the United Nations puts into the field now is substantially the same as the equipment they would have put into the field in at least World War II it's big old pots to cook in and it's tents that have a Ridge Wine and wooden poles it just hasn't changed all that much and there are two reasons for this the first is that there's no money for

[45:52](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PN7q23D4rBo&t=2752s) research and what I mean by no money for research is no money for research there's no allocation of budget in the humanitarian world to do R&D so every dollar that comes in is allocated to help with this disaster or that disaster or the next disaster and there's no sense in which this stuff is available for other purposes right you can't take money out the disaster fund and spend it on R&D because the money was never allocated for that and the re and the Charities don't raise money specifically for research so if you've got a feeli that nobody's investing in r D how are you going to get new equipment how are you going to get new Solutions so that's the first problem the second problem is even worse um do you all know what a medical ethics board is you come across this medical ethics board is the group of doctors and other people who decide whether or not it's ethical to perform an experiment so you've got a new drug you've got reasonable evidence at works you want to perform a human trial the medical ethics board says okay you can do that it's a reasonable thing to do so um you do a double blind trial you figure out what works you figure out what doesn't this is how you make progress in Sciences it affects human beings in the humanitarian World there is no equivalent to a medical ethics board so there's no R&D money and there's no way to try new technologies in life situations and when you put these two things together it means that it's practically impossible to get new ideas into the field it's really really really really difficult uh and you know that's enough to slow up the pace of progress to the point where we're using substantially the same models and substantially the same equipment as was being deployed 60 years ago um so to move past this right there's a ton of really basic change going on in the game um you know obvious technological changes in wider Society mobile phone networks GPS satellites computers Biometrics digital ID all of that stuff has potential applications right you want to find out who people's kids are in disaster you can just you know scan everybody as they go by and figure out who's who you can really do that so it's not all that difficult um accountability and finance once you got computers in the loop it's a lot easier to figure out where the money went it's a lot easier to give people local authority to allocate money

[48:22](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PN7q23D4rBo&t=2902s) and to make decisions because you can get information about what they did in real time so you can enable people to just go out there and fix things and if something goes wrong you could tell them Whoa stop because you get information about what's happening in real time you don't have to have a plan that people agree to and then you send them off into the field to execute the plan you can send them off into the field with a basic strategy and then they can decide what to do based on local conditions and if you don't like it you can ask them to stop and say whoa that we tried that before it doesn't work do this instead it's different management approach enabled by it different kinds of Interest structure we briefly talked about this solar panels substitute for power um solar water disinfection and solar water pasteurization both of those are new techniques that will allow you to purify water using only the sun uh toilets you know the Sulabh toilet it's a brick pit and it's a very effective toilet it costs about $10 per house to build sometimes less there are composting toilets there are all kinds of different technologies that can restore basic essential Services very quickly after a disaster but also would continue to function as development Aid afterwards because you solve the problem that people have and now it's solved it wasn't solved before can of make sense um bureaucracy right the level of bureaucracy in this game is incredible because you've got governments and you've got NOS the noos are handling public money and their brand and their reputation is their ability to raise funds in future the governments or developing World governments that are very sensitive about you know the way that they're dealing with their populations and the way they're looking after their people they're often a bit shy about asking for help then you put those two things together and you add some military as the only group that are actually capable of turning up and doing stuff on a huge scale very quickly you get horrific bureaucratic problems and lots of cross talk and confusion and unwillingness to adapt and all the rest of this stuff but there are new approaches right once you start getting you know really fluid flow of information across organizations once people really start talking to each other regularly you could get these radical breakthroughs in the way the organizations work together that can be more effective in changing what happens in the field than any given technology and I think we're just at the beginning of a real kind of golden age of inter agency cooperation maybe that's what I like to believe okay um Hightech rich areas that is to say us it also applies to cities

[50:52](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PN7q23D4rBo&t=3052s) in the developing World um it applies to the more developed parts of even very poor countries um the big six assets that we have money right huge just incredible amount of wealth um does anybody know roughly what the average Swedish taxpayer pays per year for tax it's probably 10 15 20,000 something like that something um well it depends how you can you also include Sal tax and things like that yeah absolutely yeah so I mean that's just what people are paying in taxes is the total income of something like 50 people in a developing world country you know that's just what people are paying in taxes these are just enormous sums of money so even if you only take a tiny part out of the taxable income of you know the entire Swedish Nation it's a ton of money to do research it's a ton of money to find Solutions um and if you take countries like America oh my God pagon is a half a trillion dollar budget the cost of the Iraq War was $1,000 for every man woman and child who in the developing world I mean really seriously right we we could have fixed Global poverty for the price of the IRA but that's nothing new um okay second thing knowledge right germ Theory you know understanding the diseases are caused by little animals that self-replicate and cause you all kinds of problems germ Theory is not something that the average person in the developed world has access to they genuinely don't understand why you get sick and as a result it's very hard for them to understand why things like sanitation are important now in some areas that's to true in some areas they' be excellent education sorry did you have a question um but in general you know germ theory is a really fundamental piece of intellectual equipment and if you understand germ Theory you can make accurate decisions in all kinds of complicated areas about food about water about sanitation you could understand something about how to manage an epidemic and that's just with germ Theory we could be teaching 5-year-old germ Theory it's just not that difficult right so those knowledge resources that we have access to in the educated parts of the world are enormously important it's Material Science it's engineering it's medicine it's the ability to build things like satellites GPS systems the

[53:22](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PN7q23D4rBo&t=3202s) knowledge assets of the the high-tech areas are enormously valuable in terms of trying to figure out how to help people um political and military power you know basically stop that or will bomb you one kind of power political power will you know we're going to be renegotiating these trade agreements in two years if you guys are willing to compromise on this we'll give you some of that in exchange how would that be right um political and military power particularly is very useful in cases where you're doing with refugees and idps so being able to say to a government look if you accept these refugees we guarantee that we will you know not leave you in a position where you're unable to pay for them we we'll take care of that that's partly money but it's also political power the military power side of it is things like un peacekeepers whoa big disaster send the UN peacekeepers political and military power um mobile expert teams this is your typical disaster relief agencies right you turn up and a bunch of people jump out of a plane run over there and do stuff and often those people are incredibly highly trained and very capable many of them are NGO many of them are military there are a few other different kinds of expeditionary for but the ability to putop you know people on the ground with serious medical skills and Equipment anywhere in the world in 24 or 48 hours is incredibly valuable and it's it's a capability that we can send in a very direct way um Advanced heavy Logistics this is your ability to get a 747 full of medical equipment or a 747 full of tents close to the disaster area in 36 hours whoa something terrible happened throw the gear on a plane fly the plane land the plane deliver the goods that capability is very dependent on computers it's very dependent on trucking networks there are whole bunch of factors that combine to create that ability to just move gear quickly and then finally undamaged physical infrastructure I mean if the entire world had a systemic problem like pandemic flu the developed areas would not be able to help the other areas because our infrastructure would be damaged we'd have our own problems we wouldn't have a secure base to reach out from but for minor disasters for disasters that are focused in one place we can work from this undamaged industrial base and this undamaged platform and we can reach out to put resources into the field somewhere else using the logistical backbone or we still have a communication Network that works basically perfectly so we can

[55:52](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PN7q23D4rBo&t=3352s) Shuffle information around the world from the secure base does that make sense so these are the my that's this is my breakdown of the assets that the high-tech world has that it can use to respond in a disaster can anybody think of something that isn't on this list any ideas I think it's a pretty comprehensive list but I could be missing something so um designers right or at least we're functioning as designers so we're part of the asset and to me this is really the core competency of designers in this field right there are things which really fundamentally have always been possible but that nobody really discovered and turned into a technique and a good example is solar water disinfection solar water disinfection is this technique where you take river water put it in a bottle leave it in the sun the ultraviolet light and the heat kill almost all the things that can make you sick in the water water and it could save uh 2 3 4 5 million lives a year it's a really big deal technology now solar water disinfection was discovered less than 30 years ago solar water pasteurization which is a neighboring technique was discovered by a graduate student in something like 1997 we've been pasteurizing milk for 100 years something like that and nobody yeah at least 100 years nobody had ever thought wow I wonder what happens if you pasteurizer water oh we could pasteurizer that would work could we pasteurizer with the sun we could totally pasteurizer water with the Sun that would work and that Discovery it was latent in what was already happening and somebody figured out that it was possible and that it was a good idea and then they did it and they proved it to work that solution had always been there in nature but it took a designer or an engineer or a scientist to pull it out and turn it into part of you know the human knowledge base into part of human capability and that's a huge breakthrough before they invented solar water disinfection and solar water pasturization we did not know how to provide Safe Drinking Water to most people on the planet now we know how all we have to do is do it so it went from being an unsolvable problem to a solvable problem same thing with global food supply in the past we had no idea how to feed everybody and then we got better Agricultural Science and we

[58:22](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PN7q23D4rBo&t=3502s) figured out that it was possible and it went from being an unsolvable problem to being a solvable problem now you still need to apply political power and you still need to apply money to taking these solvable problems in ter to solve the problems but we've done some pretty good stuff on that front um anybody remember small pox small pox right small pox killed 500 million people in the 20th century by one estimate that I read 500 million people when it hit Iceland in something like 1750 it killed a third of the population in a year year and a half but small box is gone we killed small box we found every single reserve of small box and we exterminated it and now there is no more small pox fantastic right so it's not that we're not solving basic problems getting rid of small pox was a huge win it probably killed more people in the 20th century than anything else all the wars and all the genocides and stuff killed maybe a quarter as many people or half as many people as small po so is it possible that we could take hunger and push it the same way that we pushed small pox could we take waterborne disease and push it the same way that we pushed small pox we just you know push it over the cliff into history and it would never come back I think we could do that because if every 5-year-old child in the developing World knew how to do solar water pasteurization and solar water disinfection then you could easily wind up with that knowledge becoming part of human culture in the same way that many other fundamental skills are part of human culture and once it's deeply embedded in human culture it will never go away it'll be there as long as language is so I think that there's a lot of room here for really radical breakthroughs in um long-term human problems and there's some evidence that that's already happening so clean manal slate you really got to look at this stuff and say look in a one ways we might as well be the first generation to be looking at this stuff because if anybody could solv problem before it would not still be a problem does that make sense right yeah I there's a ton of work there are lots of things that you should read there are lots of things that you should know there are lots of things you should think about but if anybody had gotten this right there would not be a problem left for you to work on right I I came into this field in 2002 when I invented the hexayurt that building you were all wandering around in previous to that I'd been working on things like energy policy and I'd done a ton of

[1:00:52](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PN7q23D4rBo&t=3652s) software work so I invented the hexayurt and suddenly I discovered that all these disaster relief people were like ooh shiny we had no idea that was possible I'm like but this is really simple but nobody had done it then I started looking around in the field both at disaster relief and poverty alleviation and there's a lot of work but there's very little sign that they' found solutions that really really really scale because the problems are still there and then you look at the work in detail and you realize that a lot of it was just you know it was done by people People Like Us operating on tiny little budgets because there's very little real money in the field at this point it's all really kind of string and duct tape and ceiling waxs and hacks and little corner ends budgets and stuff like this it's not like you're operating inside a medical science where you know there's been trillions of dollars spent to solve you know these problems and there are you know hundreds of thousands of doctors working together on Research there are dozens of international ccer institutes this stuff is not like that far more people dying of all these you know poverty Associated diseases than any of this other stuff but because there's no real return on investment the commercial sector isn't funding it and because it doesn't immediately turn into foreign policy influence governments aren't funding it so it's this field which is filled with places where single individuals can make a pretty serious difference because so little work has really been done you know so it's not it's not like you're coming into a field where everything's already been figured out you're coming into a field where the big questions are still wide open and the Breakthrough could be you know a graduate student invented solar water pasteurization I was an amateur I invented the hexayurt now I don't know that the hex is important with solar water pasturization but I'm saying it's perfectly possible for people to make contributions in this field that could turn some of these problems from unsolved to solved or from solvable to actually the problem is gone it's not something where you're operating in an environment where all the research has been done we're just at the very beginning of this stuff does that make sense can you kind of see that it's not closed field it's a wide open field um so I want to talk a little about the hexayurt um conventional approach right tents are carried by plane into the disaster area the hex approach instead you're going to use trucks to carry in plywood now that doesn't sound like a terribly radical

[1:03:22](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PN7q23D4rBo&t=3802s) difference does it I mean it's not that big a shift what goes along with that is you know you wind up doing a whole bunch of construction in the field um you wind up relying on local skills and local knowledge and local materials um in later years you could easily see a situation where people built the hexayurts using plywood without having to have an international agency come and help so it's beginning to move towards a situation in which places like Bangladesh might become self-sufficient for emergency shelter because they just buy them materials they need from India or the International Community gives the money and they buy the materials from India so you get away from this kind of tent idea and then you know when you're done using the hexayurt as a hex ear you can just take out the screws and you can use it as plywood to build your house again or you can you know use it as firewood or you can take it to pieces and use it as spares for something else or you can store it or you can use it as an animal shed you can live in it it's a lot more multi functional than a tent is because a tent really only works as a tent and it doesn't last all that long um one of the approaches that I've talked about is getting a whole bunch of people from say an Indian Building Company the kind of guys who go out to build skyscrapers in Dubai and you could train these guys to build hexayurts pretty easily it's probably a two-day or three-day training course at the end of which if you need to have three or 500 people turn up at a disaster site to lead the Reconstruction process you hire Indian building workers who are tough they're used to living in these kind of terrible conditions or at least bad conditions they're very very cheap they're very hardworking and for the price of putting one Western disaster relief specialist into the field you can probably hire 30 of these guys and if what you need to do is you need to build housing really cheaply maybe that makes a a ton more sense than you know sending in foreign engineers and again this is this whole thing of building a South South cooperation where other countries could hire the same Indian building companies that had all this experience building hexayurts for their own disasters and because the technology is so simple the locals could come to learn and understand how it's done and then the next time they don't even call the Indians and this is an example of Open Source collaboration it's passing along skills and knowledge to solve the problem now is that a potential fix for all the shelter problems no but it might work pretty well in areas where you've got industrial cities which are close to the areas with the problem which have not themselves be damaged and that's some

[1:05:52](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PN7q23D4rBo&t=3952s) percentage of cases my guess is it's about 70% might be 50% kind of depends so that's an example of a fresh perspective producing fresh possibilities that really isn't a very complicated situation I this is not seriously deep rocket science right it's a simple way of using pre-existing materials and an idea about well it's so simple anybody could do it why don't we um the field is open to Innovation right any one of you could come up with something that is easily that useful and probably more and you've got you know kind of a research mandate where you can actually sit down and really think about these problems and you know it's perfectly possible you could come up with real solutions this is not a field that's been mined out this is a field that's wide open um so oh and I just want to come back to this right in terms of the assets right these six assets what does the hex use undamage physical infrastructure that's your plywood Supply Logistics that's your Trucking knowledge that's the fact that it's possible this is how you build a hats here so those are three of the six assets that been combined to produce a solution and if we go back to the assets there we are right so it doesn't take very much money if you did use money you'd use it to buy the stuff the knowledge is the simple design pattern for making it doesn't rely on political or military power might rely on mobile expert teams but it probably wouldn't be the kind of people that we're used to sending it probably be developing World construction workers uses the logistics but it's not nothing more complicated than Trucking physical infrastructure that's the reserves apply and the ability to make more so it's a different way of combining these assets to get change on the ground um where are we okay so this this the Val line between tents and transitional housing um your average Refugee is a refugee for something like uh 10 to 20 years that are 30 to 60 million of them depending on how you count it's a big deal problem um this idea that you're going to put down tents on the ground and then when you go away by the time the tent Falls to park these people have built their houses again it doesn't really happen like that in the real world so div dissolving that divide so that the shelter that you go out with on day one lasts for 5 to 10 years is a big step anything in that field will help it t uh Water Sanitation cooking power for telephones there's a whole world of stuff there which has been developed in the appropriate technology world for

[1:08:22](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PN7q23D4rBo&t=4102s) development that could easily be repurposed for disaster relief you know how do you make it lighter how do you make it cheaper how do you make it possible to pack a 100 million of them into a plane lots of room there for Innovation um particular because some of those techniques are completely new particularly in the water field there's just a ton of new work there ICT huge huge huge area all kinds of crazy stuff you can do with computers which might help for disaster relief I mean just point to stick it there's no end of solutions um I think there's a lot of room for using um phones that can do mapping which you know probably half of the telephones sold in the developed world at this point are capable doing Maps five or 10 years from now that would be true in the developing world as well you have a crisis you got mapping software that runs on a phone that tells you where the nearest Food Depot is it tells you where the shelter resources are tells you where the medical resources are it gives you medical advice there's a ton that could be done there empowering people with resources and education um as governments run into more and more problems that they're having a hard time facing they're getting more and more and more into this idea of individual empowerment right they're they're really not coping all that well with things like global warming they're not coping all that well with things like HIV they're not coping all that well with the economic problems of the world there are lots of areas where governments are struggling as hard as they can to get handle on situations and just not succeeding and what's coming out of that is a new culture in government that says hey if the individual can solve this problem you guys knock yourselves out uh and there's a lot of room for that approach um the more of the load of responding to disasters that can be taken at an individual level the more happier what governments would be uh finally this fundamental thing of restoring economic self-sufficiency you know that's not being an explicit goal in disaster relief ever that I'm aware of it's not being defined as you know our goal is to put people back on their feet economically and then leave so if you start out with that goal in mind maybe you can find some clever sh shortcuts um one of the things that was discussed a long time ago was creating cardboard shelters like hexayurts and building seeds into the cardboard and the idea was that when you were done with the shelter you could then put the shelter onto the ground and it would act as a mulch and then you grow food crops now that's probably not a great way of doing it because you actually want the shelter to last for a few years but thinking about restoring Agriculture and thinking

[1:10:52](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PN7q23D4rBo&t=4252s) about um sending tools rather than equipment or rather than Solutions there's lots of room for sort of ideas in that kind of area um I think you can get a lot away sending out bags of fertilizer at the same time as you sent on your tents pretty much try to get people started in agriculture as quickly as possible figure out what crops are fast start crops so that you can PL plant a crop immediately as the disaster begins to end so that you've got at least some food coming out the ground as people are beginning to recover there lots of room there for this kind of research very little work has been done on this um what are the constraints spending power disaster victim 202 to $100 there's just really not a ton of money flying around tents cost $100 to Air Freight so if you're going to move anything hippy it's going to be expensive unless you're going to move it by track which means you've got to have it in the area already NOS are horrifically slow to adopt new ideas I'm not going to say any more about that how can people help themselves best this is the key question the more you can get local resilience the more you can get people to clean up after the disaster themselves the more that you can enable people to rebuild themselves the happier everybody will be because we don't really get effective response to every Global disaster there are lots of global disasters that happen that never really catch the media's attention so the NGS never really succeed in raising a pile of money so they don't mount a serious response even when they do mount a serious response they don't get everywhere in Afghanistan there were lots of places the NOS just couldn't get to because there was no way to get access there are lots of situations where there just isn't enough money to meet the Avail meet the needs of the population and the NOS turn up and they do what they can but if they don't have enough money to provide they don't have enough money so the more you can think about things that will help people to help themselves and that can be taken over by indigenous populations so the people of Bangladesh learn some new technique and that becomes how they solve the problem in future the more of that you can do the better um working on poverty not just disaster again you know fundamentally poverty is why people are so vulnerable to disaster the more you can do about the underlying poverty before during and after disaster the better and I think there really is a ton of room for having systems that go out there in a disaster that remain as development Aid and I think water and sanitation are really key areas for that um finally really a lot of new stuff is

[1:13:22](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PN7q23D4rBo&t=4402s) happening in the world you go back five 10 years internet GPS uh whole bunch of new signs about disease uh better access to Advanced Medical testing through biotechnology there's really a lot of new stuff happening uh at foreign policy level you can see the decline of us power is a big part of what's happening globally uh the UN is beginning to get a lot more ambitious European Union has much tighter integration the world is really changing in some very interesting ways so there's lots of room there to update existing models of how various kinds of business processes are done how various kinds of Technologies are used in ways that will open up new possibilities um does that make sense I me you s see the scope there right as the technological base shifts and as the scientific base shifts you can look at old problems you apply the new ideas and you can get real progress um are you there already what time is it 10 P 10 past is that when we were supposed to finish look at that cool okay so the final section that we'll do after the break designed for scalability how do you get a solution that will work on the scale of the problem rather than just live inside a laboratory so um so design for scalability what I mean by this is these are really really kind of large problems and what you want is Solutions which are realistically applicable to the problem as a whole you don't want to solve it for just one little corner for one specific sub problem you want to produce something which is credibly a solution for the entire Mass right um could you just check is that camera actually counting the whole screen yeah okay so um I give you an example of this which is the tent right the tent is not a great solution in some ways it doesn't last very long in the sun that's its main problem but at the end of the day tents are workable in almost every situation and we use an enormous number of them for all kinds of situations and a tent is a scalable solution it kind of works um a solution that turned out not to be scalable is geodesic dome what geodesic domes you know Buckminster Fuller right it looks fine on paper in practice it turns out not to be scalable because they're just too freaking difficult to produce right they're really really it's a bunch of math and if you get your

[1:15:52](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PN7q23D4rBo&t=4552s) pieces slightly WR they don't fit and if they don't fit there's really no way of understanding why they're very difficult to waterproof I mean there's just there's a bunch of practical problems with does tents are scalable domes turn out not to be yet maybe you need CAD C manufacturing maybe you need new materials technology maybe there's some th trick that we missed but the Dome is not scalable in the same way um other examples of things which are genuinely scalable Coca-Cola cellones Land Rovers television radio refined sugar caffeine right these are things that were not globally available but it turns out that people like them so much they will pay to have them available almost anywhere in the world right and you can get a carburetor for a Land Rover within 100 miles just about anywhere on the planet um and there's a reason for that the Land Rover really really really works so scalability is about producing things that can be used on a very broad scale that solve fundamental problems and ideally that people are willing to pay for at least to the point where their willingness to pay matches the cost of providing the product or service this all kind of make sense now to get to that point it's a m combination of skill and luck and frankly most of it is luck you know if you look at 100 products it would have been very hard to predict that the cell phone would go everywhere but say the transistor radio would because there are now far more cell phones and transistor radios but it's way more expensive and you need this grid and it costs money and you know it's it's hard to predict what Len will work that doesn't mean we don't try it just means you try a bunch of stuff and you see what succeeds in the market flows um and I don't necessarily mean the commercial Marketplace there are LS of definitions of the marketplace it comes down to you see what people like um but as always there are some actual you know scalability metrics right so if we run over this list strictest definition for refugees 9 million people um 9 million people is about the size of Sweden yeah little more that's by the strictest definition uh if you expand that to other definitions there are other parts of the UN that would say it's closer to 30 to 60 million and by the time you include internally displaced people uh questionable situations like Gaza by the time you stack all of these people up and you add the Iraq War numbers and all the rest of it you get much much larger numbers this is beginning to be you know pretty sizable percentage of the population of Europe it's about the size of Britain um

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Continues in https://guptaoption.com/texts/270-3.md (part 3 of 4).
End of [270] Hope For The World, part 2 of 4. Its connections are at the top of this file; the map is https://guptaoption.com/llms.txt.