# Hope For The World (part 4 of 4) > One source from the archive of Vinay Gupta's work at guptaoption.com, as plain text for AI agents: [270], part 4 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/.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 4 of 4 [1:55:52](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PN7q23D4rBo&t=6952s) that we can work with uh finally because there's so much more media and so much more ease of communication we're beginning to expect better performance and disaster relief from the ngos and the governments the bottom line is that the American government's reputation will never really recover from Hurricane Katrina because it was such a disaster and it was almost entirely caused by bureaucracy people expect better than that and they're going to put pressure on that situation as you see people beginning to blog and send video out of refugee camps and out of disaster areas you'll see much more pressure on the ngos to perform better and all of these factors contribute to pushing the state-ofthe-art Beyond where it is now into new territory and as I said this is not all you know this is not problem that somebody else sat down and solved this stuff is all wide open for people to get involved in and make a contribution to it um so time scales right I invented the hexayurt in 2002 uh first fuel test was 200 well first test was 2003 and I spent about 10 days in one in the middle of a desert in 110° fah which is is that 40 Cel something like that 35 C 4 yeah with 60 mph winds dust storms and I was there for about a week and it was great fantastic um so 2005 United States Department of Defense picked up the design and said wow this is really cool uh I did a bunch of planning for using hexayurts to clean up after a nuclear bomb in America there was a nuclear blast you'd have to rehouse something like 10 to 20 million people immediately afterwards and you couldn't rehouse them in the general population because many of them would be radiologically contaminated so you know emergency housing in that situation is a big deal okay great so now there's a Department of Defense testing program 2007 2008 I got talking to the Netherlands Red Cross they said this is very cool we like this can we get some for testing they got a testing program going we're trying to arrange how to get them into that testing program so you know that's seven years from the point where the thing was invented and we still don't have a field test it's a slow process because the bureaucracy on the other end of these situations has no money for development they're just not allocating funds to this kind of stuff even the US Department of Defense was using these tiny little you know 10 or $20,000 slices of money that were left over from [1:58:22](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PN7q23D4rBo&t=7102s) your end budgets it's not like there's a big pool of money waiting to pull these new ideas into the field so opportunities like cooperation with you know Sr um or any other NGO group that will talk to you grab that stuff and work with them as much as possible because otherwise it's a really really slow process um if we did field tests for the hexayurt and it worked great it might take 10 years before you saw two or three million people in it's a really really slow field but it is getting faster and the internet in general is accelerating change in all areas um that's the good news right and finally we can all actually help with this process it's not an area that's dominated by an enormous number of skilled Engineers who solved all these problems 20 years ago it's not like trying to design a new aircraft where there are huge companies that have got really top people working on the stuff all the time um my estimate is that there are less than a 100 people globally who are full-time researchers into shelter issues I think it's less than 100 people globally um which is really kind of shocking when you think about it you know there are a lot people who are involved in deploying shelter but there are very few pure researchers and most of those people start a company and then try and sell the shelter and then go bust because the NOS Take 5 years to buy one so what comes out with that is the real opportunity here is for open-source research where one group picks up an idea does some development work publishes everything doesn't have any patents and then moves on to do something else another group can pick that work up and continue it for another cycle and slowly many many different groups who each carry the task for 6 months or a year or two years can move it up this long long long chain of cause and effect until finally you get a new Solution that's in the field but it's going to take a different approach to the approach of start a company and immediately commercialize because people have been trying that approach for years and just doesn't work you know there are two or three little shelter companies there's um world shelters Global Village shelters there's a couple other little outfits that have really really interesting shelter technologies but they're just not making enough money to get B on really world I think world um I remember there's a dome company whose name is temporarily escaping me that actually survives and makes a living this way but in general [2:00:52](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PN7q23D4rBo&t=7252s) it's not something where the existing development models work very well but there's lots of room for open source style collaboration to make this stuff happen uh and I think that the last slide yes that's it so I'm going to go back just close to the beginning point out one more thing in a lot more detail so th this model of you know too hot too cold hunger thirst illness and injury um individual household Town region world this model is really useful when you start trying to Define systems right a shelter is primarily to protect you from the Heat and the cold and it's mainly household level if you designed a shelter that was a municipal level shelter a municipal level shelter would be something like a big inflatable Stadium you could put everybody into because that can be like a towns siiz solution be beyond the individual family level you know cooking you could have an individual level stove you could have a regional stove uh sorry a town level stove where you've got a big solar oven you put your food into the solar oven along with everybody else's and you take it out and it's cooked some really interesting approaches like that same thing with water purification normally it's done at a municipal level sometimes you do it with a water filter like a biosand filter at a household level uh there's an outfit called life straw that I think is associated with the Swedish company and they put water purification at an individual level because they give you this thing that you carry around your neck that you used to drink through like a straw life straw so there's lots of room for thinking about these Solutions in terms of shelter and infrastructure in a systematic way what what kind of threat to your body we welfare is it protecting you from and what's the level that it's operating at is it individual is it household is it beyond the house is it a regional solution so this is a really useful model and it's open source it's called six ways to die and if you punch that into Google it will come up with the PDF fs and if you need an editable file I have one I can put up but it's a good way of framing the problem and um beginning to talk about for a specific shelter what range of environments is it going to protect you against is if it's going to protect you against heat is it going to protect you against cold if so how hot how cold um you know does it have any secondary benefits if you make a hexayurt out of a very reflective material one of the things you can do is put two hexayurt ARS together at the right [2:03:22](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PN7q23D4rBo&t=7402s) angle and it will make a gigantic so cooker between the two reflective walls could be all kinds of applications for sterilizing food for sterilizing water for cooking there's lots of ways that you can think about these problems um so I think I'm done not --- End of [270] Hope For The World, part 4 of 4. Its connections are at the top of this file; the map is https://guptaoption.com/llms.txt. Read next: next on the same works, [267](https://guptaoption.com/texts/267.md) The future of humanitarian innovation (2017); the most closely related, [710](https://guptaoption.com/texts/710.md) TEDxEWB - Vinay Gupta - Enabling Humanitarian Innovation (2010); his whole career in one file, https://guptaoption.com/story.md.