# Vinay Gupta at the Athens Hackerspace, 2012 September 2 (part 1 of 2)

> One source from the archive of Vinay Gupta's work at guptaoption.com, as plain text for AI agents: [322], part 1 of 2. 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, 2012-09-14 (YouTube upload date), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7PwmbIFDIR4. Text: automatic captions, partly corrected
- On the plan's timeline (by date, not by subject): after the money step (Global Village Development Bank, 2009), before the ledgers step (Ethereum launch, 2015).
- How it fits the plan (the research build's reading): Decomposes the state tier into buildable parts, the logic behind a legal status for refugee zones.
- Career works it belongs to:
  - SCIM / INAM (2009): Simple Critical Infrastructure Maps: 18 human needs across 7 scales, from the individual to the world.
  - Quaddome (2011): Community-designed dome in which every triangle is half a 4x8 sheet.
  - On Un-Designing the Cryptographic Utopia (2012): Blog essay taking apart the cypherpunk dream of a code-made society, and sketching the few cryptographic...
  - In a Page (2010): A series of one-page papers, mostly from spring 2010, each putting one argument on a single sheet. (suggested by machine)
  - The Big Deal (2011): Four-essay blog series arguing that government has hit hard limits, so civil society, working with... (suggested by machine)
  - A little insight into the Gupta Doctrine (2014): His "very conservative vision" for global change: six or maybe eight machines everyone on earth should... (suggested by machine)
- Threads (lines of work through his career) it is part of:
  - STAR-TIDES: The National Defense University project and the papers around it.
  - cryptographic applications: Cryptography applied: from 1990s cypherpunk practice to identity cards, Ethereum and Mattereum.
  - 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.
  - goat rodeo to warlords: The goat rodeo idea, from a 2010 blog post to a 2011 one-page paper to the opening chapter of Warlords, Inc. (2015). (through a work suggested by machine)
- Ideas developed here: SCIM / six ways to die
- Topics: Burning Man shelter building (13%); Property, NFTs & real-estate transactions (10%)
- Distinctive terms here, against the whole archive: Open Source Ecology (4 here; 7 sources in all, earliest dated 2002); international recognition (4 here; 10 sources in all, earliest dated 2010, 4 undated); global democracy (3 here; 12 sources in all, earliest dated 2012); clean water (4 here; 30 sources in all, earliest dated 2006, 1 undated); life support (2 here; 9 sources in all, earliest dated 2006); resource control (2 here; 11 sources in all, earliest dated 2010, 3 undated); citizens (5 here; 63 sources in all, earliest dated 2006, 3 undated); supply chain (7 here; 92 sources in all, earliest dated 2006, 4 undated); hexayurt roof (1 here; 4 sources in all, earliest dated 2006); shared succession (1 here; 7 sources in all, earliest dated 2012, 3 undated)
- The earliest dated source in this archive for (undated sources may be earlier): Estonia
- Importance: core-text score 0.64 (1.00 is the top), number 35 of the 729 sources it scored, the research build's measure of substance, importance and innovation
- Related sources:
  - [689] [Vinay Gupta - Resilience Guru | London Real (2014)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/689.md): same career work: SCIM / INAM
  - [250] [Through the Looking Glass - Vinay Gupta on systemic... (2010)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/250.md): same career work: SCIM / INAM
- On the same works, just before: [351] John Barlow at the Reykjavik Digital Freedoms Conference... (2012); [353] [Eben Moglen clip - Reykjavik Digital Freedoms Conference (2012)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/353.md); [323] [Vinay Gupta at the Athens Hackerspace (highlights) (2012)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/323.md)
- On the same works, just after: [408] [H4D2 review (2012)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/408.md); [407] [H4D2.eu Final presentations (2012)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/407.md); [401] [Meaning Conf Livestream 7 @meaningconf (2012)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/401.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: Vinay Gupta at the Athens Hackerspace, 2012 September 2, video, 2012-09-14, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7PwmbIFDIR4; in Vinay Gupta's archive at guptaoption.com, source [322], https://guptaoption.com/texts/322.md.

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

## Passages, part 1 of 2
[0:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7PwmbIFDIR4&t=0s) all right shall we get started yeah so um I'm V uh and this is uh ha um the the name of the talk is Dr everything and I'm going to start from one example and then go back to discuss a range of possibilities and then do some analysis so we're going to go from a very specific thing back out to the rest of the picture and then figure out whether there are any holes in the basic story so if you spot something that doesn't quite make sense or that you don't follow uh stop be and then we can uh sort of work on that and explain so um uh this is the X um invented in 2002 more or less by accident uh based on Buckman for fours work and it's a very simple open source house the degree of simple is po so the the point of the hexayurt is that it's a very very simple technology uh the entire magic is this wall is a single piece of 4x8 sheet or 1.2x 2.4 M and this triangle is also half a sheet so you Lally just take the pieces you cut like this bam instant houses and you can make them out of just about anything that the industrial supply chain has come for bird right there's your wall piece there's your roof piece uh the these are the little connector blocks and they're 120° angles and 60° angles and there you have a very very simple housing technology and at this point you see how simple it is right there's just nothing more to explain just about anybody who's technically skilled can go and build one after 2 minutes of introduction and maybe two pictures B and that's very typical of the free Technologies which actually work they tend to need to very simple

[2:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7PwmbIFDIR4&t=150s) quick easy get started kind of interface um forward right there's your parts list for this building 12 pels 324s 200 screws and you see you know we've got this radical radical compressed Simplicity what this means is that we can change the manufacturing technology for the panels to just about anything without having to screw the core of the design sandwich panels cardboard uh aircraft aluminum uh honeycomb po propoline honeycomb cardboard plywood USB uh Plastics you can basically take anything that comes off the industrial supply chain and build these and what you get from that is a sort of orthogonality like you see in a programming language where the function is hexayurt and the input is more or less anything that comes out of the industrial system and you get this this but you get this with cold weather hot weather extremely strong extremely cheap temporary permanent it's a completely adjustable range of possibilities because you've managed to work directly on top of the industrial supply chain it's kind of like working with uh standard European paper sizes once you pick a standard European paper size you can go up and down in size completely fluidly from a little postcard up to a huge cight of building poster you know A6 print um the reason this matters is usually everything to do with houses is a complete pain in the ass right it's 75,000 different components it's enormous amounts of expense it's €300 for a window which has to be made to submm Precision otherwise it's not waterproof it's all of these kind of problems and as a result housing is absurdly expensive it's just crazy right I mean I recently did the calculations uh I I could replace every piece of technology in my life with the best kind of prummer equivalent thing that's been manufactur now for the same price as 4 months of rent for a cheap apartment in one and this is a total Distortion thank this is a total Distortion in the way that things uh are in other areas right housing and cars have managed to stay extremely expensive because they're extremely complicated and as a result

[5:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7PwmbIFDIR4&t=300s) we've got a massively distorted global economy where everything is screwed up for the the whole nature of this economic crisis that we're in is that the price of pain for infrastructure and housing and all these basic utilities for people has turned out to be so expensive we've borrowed all this money and bankrupt Europe and the situation in the US is just as bad bad engineering turns into bad financial problems and turns into terrible terrible policy that's a real issue and can you check is that camera running you see do have [Music] countown uh when it gets close to running out of time it only shoots in 30 minute blocks uh let we know what I'll pause me re so does that kind of make sense so far you take a simple technology you plug it into the industrial supply chain you get this s anality but it's unlike the way we do just about everything else it's the return to this kind of Simplicity that might give us the possibility of a technological breakout that would fundamentally change the way that our civilization operates and it's my belief that if we don't make that breakout we are in serious danger of winding up out these farms and possibly back in the caves it's done

[6:12](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7PwmbIFDIR4&t=372s) serious um so let me show you the first real set of innovations that came this uh pick there so this was the first X here that's the common one these are the simple modifications of it this GIF is going real fast these are the big does and these are the enormous hybrids and we've got maybe seven different designers that have worked on this all of them start with 1.2x 2.4 M boards and all of them work with the same basic approach if you have whole boards or half boards uh let me show you a particular couple of good examples um this is the big dop um every single triangle on this uh except for these ones is one half of a sheet PL or whatever it is you have in half so your manufacturing instruction is take the boards cut them in half and screw them together into these shallow cones uh this triangle here you can see is basically a single sheet you cut off one corner of the halfway point and that makes the triangle covers that face have any of you ever built a buckon or Flor style GBC do right f are pain in the eyes all these different pieces all these different lenss trigonometry five components well it's three components and one um um just one connector not too small and when you start trying to cover the Dooms with panel materials to make something that insulates or is strong the covering is the thing in the it's a pain in the ass right and it's a pain in the ass because the things don't fit right they don't fit because the Fuller geometry existed in the abstract with no supply chain in bminer fl's mind so FL work at the mathematical optimization based on spherical trigonometry which doesn't map into anything we can actually produce in Industry so what we did for these was we started with the industrial component and this was produced by a mathematician called Edmund Harris who simply said right give me your two titles and I'll design you a spherical P Tada use the right math get the right

[8:42](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7PwmbIFDIR4&t=522s) solution bring the complexity and toost down by literally in order of magnitude and one of these Little Miracles is that Edmund produces this thing and uploads the designs on the internet four months later people we've never heard of were building them a burning man and sending those pictures and you know this is amazing see I can find a picture of this sorry I have like 64 documents open cuz I'm trying to pull together a complex thing and we should just go this email up Blue by the way we built one wow um you're actually did you use the Dome calculator that's yeah so I computed those numbers there was a there was a typo in Buck patent in the fourth decimal place and if you built to that design at a 48t dome You' get about a 6 in error and in 1995 some hippies came to me and said B can you fix this and it took me about 6 weeks and then I figured out you could do a py totally embarrassing um so this sort of thing is a different kind of artifact from the things that we see produced by our civilization right it's a bit weird looking it's a bit SP AG but most of all it's radical orthogonal Simplicity you can imagine a housing ecology where you've got these panel components in a bunch of standard sizes and you put some standard connectors and you could take this thing and break it down into four hexayurts this this section here is a hexayurt roof if you do the engineering a little differently you can make a fullen hex to ex the the same design the roof panels fold at the center of each section the whole thing con as a show some video that later on so looks like we could do single family housing using a completely radical approach it's completely suitable for DIY you buy the materials at the store you want a structural insulated panel you want aircraft aluminum you want whatever it happens to be you cut them on a table saw which is a pretty cheap piece of Hardware you take them to where you're going to go and you bolt them together and basically because you've got a very efficient very strong design you could fit the entire house in the back an ordinary moving that just for the insulated shell right for and Foundations are still a bit tricky but eventually somebody will

[11:12](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7PwmbIFDIR4&t=672s) figure out a smart way of doing that maybe gr screws and well 30 sheets of material for 45 square m what is your material cost €50 a sheet 30 sheets of material ,500 for your bits maybe cost €100 a shoe well then it's €3,000 for a house now we still got to figure out the bathroom and the showers and the electrical systems and all the rest of this but you sort of see the direction that I'm beginning to ease towards right something very funny can help here and this was the original Vision that Buckminster for had but he was working before we had this kind of design tools before we had an open source or free uh ecology before we had all modern ideas it's taken about 60 years for Buckminster for's work to get simple and when things get simple that's when they begin to grow if you have something which is simple and useful and then people begin to build it and work with it and make modifications and make changes and contribute you get this kind of growth into something useful and it meets the both the simple starting point and it meets this kind of Park and additional additive complexity make sense so far any questions about the hexayurt or we pretty much run no but I seems very good idea to help help people who doesn't have a house especially here in Greece with Current financial status to have a roof on over their heads M thank you and this is kind of what it was originally designed for was refugees uh the other thing is this is a satellite picture from Burning Man actually a drone picture of the fly over um and uh each red star is a hexayurt you can just about see the silver of roof so last yearning that six roughly 600 units built that we could identify from space this year we completely sold out the material supply chain for the tape that you used to assemble the hexayurt about a month or 6 weeks before burning them so we don't how many exerts will be built this year but it's enough that we sold out the total material supply chain for one components just can't buy the stuff in America so now let's take a look at this from an abstract perspective right we've got a nice clear example let's look at

[13:42](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7PwmbIFDIR4&t=822s) the abstract um so this is uh a system

[13:45](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7PwmbIFDIR4&t=825s) called simple critical infrastructure maps and you can think of it as being a sort of systems Dynamics model for civilization and a very very crud level uh and I'll show you another form of this in a second let's just deal with the basics so 7 years of political organization y okay sorry so 7 years of BU organization individual household village town or municipality region country World um it's a very very simple descriptive model that gives you a basic sense of how things operate reasonable just as a sort first cap of the tiers of government then on the other axis we've got an 18. checklist which is the very very simplest abstract form of what it takes to operate individual set of life civilization a state however everyone think about it the system so that 18o checklist breaks in into four levels individual group organization State the first nine items are physical the second nine items are organizational and this model is in use of the Pentagon it's in use uh in government Spain uh UK Ministry of defense is quite into it a lot of survivalists are using it in generally seems to work pretty well when people start using it to do analysis and it's creative common lense so for the individual to exist you need protection from being too hot too cold hungry thirsty ill or injured and if all of those basic needs are covered you will stay alive and go de basic life does that make sense this is the absolute total brutal Simplicity of raw survival nothing more nothing less once you have a set of individuals who are safe and secure you get to a second question which is how do you form a group with a perfect example so Communications is how you knew this event was happening uh workspace is the space we're meeting in transport is how you got here and resource control is why this is not currently being used uh for

[16:15](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7PwmbIFDIR4&t=975s) another Workshop or as a bar this is how we form groups if we want to go from a group to an organization oh resource control no it's the first nonphysical thing right that's a that's a social structure if we want to go from a group to an organization you need three sort of C Properties or or states of mind you need a shared MK of reality which is a set of basic assumptions right if you're a church group you have a completely different model of reality from say the police force or from a hospital so the hospital is M Realties we're a hospital we treat diseases these are the kinds of things we do these are the kinds of people we have it's an AB abstract wall and all of the hack spaces basically share a common map of reality which is what makes some hack spaces it's like cultural DNA you then go to sheriff PL so relative to some objective this is what we're going to do we have a forest fire we're going to go and put the forest fire up we have a conference we're going to invite some speakers we're going to make sure that there is uh food and drink and video recording and all the rest of these functions finally what makes an organization different from say a tribe is a shared succession model if our leadership stops performing we will have an election and we will replace the board if our leadership stops reforming uh we will you know call the Bishop and we'll have the guy replaced and that's when you become an institution an organization where the objective is more important than the current leadership and this is a critical psychological difference between organizations and social groups make sense so far now this is pretty abstract but one of the problems that we have right now is that almost all of the organizations that run our societies are completely dysfunctional and very very badly underperforming the state is terrible the police are terrible the ambulance service and the fire service and everything else are 10 15 20 years out to date technologically the educational system is a joke in most countries and it's worse than a joke in England and you can go through and look at all of these organizations ations they haven't been able to successfully update their maps to keep Pace with the technological change and the social change of the 21st century they all seem to act as if it's about 1970 or 1975 maybe we should think about using this internet thing for Education

[18:45](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7PwmbIFDIR4&t=1125s) perhaps maybe we could email students their homework really this is the best we can do you know Ian KH Academy is a total hack right you know KH Academy this guy who makes videos of Wikipedia articles reads the Wikipedia article a couple of times explains how something works draws diagrams on a kind of electronic whiteboard thing puts the videos on YouTube they get like 380 million views um and the fact that that's regarded as being a revolutionary thing in education gives you a sense of how badly the educational institutions are failing MIT you oh we're the great you know leaders we have open courseware it's videos of lectures this is what you got your videoos electric that's revolutionary electronic education how is the talk video how does that has 10 more minutes 10 more minutes okay so the problem with the institutional DNA you know that's a place in your mental model you can put it the map is out the DAT the plans are therefore wrong because if the map is wrong the plan will be finally we get to this complicated thing called the state um generally speaking people are not very concerned about defining the state or thinking about what the state is we sort of assume it into existence my personal perspective is I Don't Fear the state I fear that the state will collapse before we have a meaningful alternative because the core organizations that make up the state all have shared Maps which are so out of date they're no longer able to C with

[20:22](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7PwmbIFDIR4&t=1222s) reality and a general historical rule is that when you require people to believe in something that doesn't exist you have to hit them with the hammer to make them obey and the best example of this that we have right now is the fact that the guys who found with the pirate they are being extradited from countries like Cambodia and thrown in jail in Sweden to maintain a business model that has nothing to do with modern technology every machine that transmits packets when somebody moves a file across the internet technically has a copy of it computers copy bits primitive operation CP bam B B B bam it's right there in the microprocessor very lowest architectural level it's right there on the networks it's in cashing you know computers manipulate data the first thing you do is you make a copy before you start hacking crazy crazy crazy crazy crazy situation when we're attempting to prevent the use of the most basic function of an information processing system by throwing people in jail right this is insanity it's just bunker right it's the same sort of territories you got from the Catholic church trying to enforce heresy regulations in say 1500 ad I am very sorry you are just not allowed to say that the earth goes around the Sun that's absolutely destructive to our faith tough right and this notion that what we have is a pervasive social problem that comes for organizations of out ofd Maps is the core of the next step either the organizations radically update Maps or the organizations fail in their Co Miss does that kind of make sense educational institutions that fail in their core Mission Produce graduates who are clueless news fire services that fail in their core Mission you wind up with half of your country burning down and don't be seem to be able to do anything a state that fails in its core Mission fails to dot dot dot now we have to ask function of the state does this make sense I mean I'm kind diging through this in a little bit of detail because it seems like this kind of structural analysis might be interesting to you as you know hackers who livein a potentially failing state so my model with the state is that the state's primary output is Justice it's courts of law it's the ability to actually have a case tried and get an objective verdict there are lots of cases where

[22:52](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7PwmbIFDIR4&t=1372s) things like National Defense have been organized by citizen militias but generally speaking anything that has a court is a state and things don't have court are not States and that's slightly arbitrary but it's a much more useful definition than talking about use of force or the presence of an army or International recognition in the abstract your courts of what making a state so we see that the state has a legal jurisdiction U map of territory where it claims that jurisdiction operates a list of citizens that that jurisdiction covers and that's the sort of functional definition of what the state controls these people in this geography then you need effective institutions to just do the general business of the state and finally if all of that stuff works well enough you get International recognition that's what makes you a country does this make sense so far so you get things like The Basque country in Spain where it's kind of a country and kind of not a country and it's got a lot of these attributes but it doesn't quite have full set but possibly if Spain had real problems the bus to just going to flip the switch and ask for a flight oh they already have a flight they'd ask for a a seat at the UN okay reasonable now what I'm going to suggest is that

[24:10](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7PwmbIFDIR4&t=1450s) all of this stuff is potentially software so this legal jurisdiction is an abstract thing but a map of territory well that's open street map Sy the list of citizens that's some kind of public identity database you know you could do Facebook if you felt like being a slave or you could use the gpg web trust if you felt like making your wife really complicated remember simple public key infrastructure spki then reborn as sdsi uh simple I can't remember any remember what sdsi is so very very simple sophisticated public key infrastructure that allows you to certify that you know somebody allows you to CER certify somebody's allowed in your house on this day it allows you to generate a very very flexible set of cryptographic tokens and certificates using a standard description language and really really simple mod pie stuff so you take something like that and you can generate a list of citizens and you can generate clever kinds of anonymous IDs where you know you show an ID at a bar and it lets you drink but it doesn't tell the owner your name unless you punch some we could actually generate a pretty definitive list of that was cryptographically protected so that it couldn't be used to spers and that's within the sort of domain of things that softw projects do we're building Global infrastructure like Wikipedia like open street maps um all the networking stuff that's running on open source runs the internet free software by um so this is sort of like a very big software project effective institutions we can't really touch that one because we don't have control of the in tions to change the way they operate we got part of that International recognition well we're generally operating countries that already have international recognition so an update of the way that the state operates so that you actually have properly digital stuff in there could result in radical shifts of the way that Society operates without actually punishing holes in the basic functions but this is pretty speculative but there are some examples of countries going down this path far away Estonia issued a secure ID tag to every one of its citizens so rather than having one of these things hanging off your keychain for every account you would one it was given by the government and it had quite a good API that would

[26:40](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7PwmbIFDIR4&t=1600s) allow your bank or any website that car to to use that token to authenticate you without having any access to the rest of the state's databases about your ener uh sort of uh ability to map your behavior across multiple sites does this begin the same direction so what I want to suggest is that the place where we're stuck right now is right up here right the problem that we have is that we're depended on completely archaic infrastructure Civic infrastructure for all of our essential Services the road Network the cars that drive on the road the gasoline goes on the road that stuff is 150 years old and it's all right you could build a car that weighed 300 kg run on batteries was charged from the Sun of the wind and got the equivalent of 700 m per ler in terms of its net carbon out uh there's a project called hyper car from 1992 that basically outlines how you would do that there's an open source car project called River simple which is actually making a production hydrogen C basically that template and it's designed for small bch manufact Ines L thousand does anybody want to guess what the number one obstacle is the other companies nope the pr the gas nope right safety regulations Yeah so basically that's the other component right you could think s companies You2 million EUR worth of testing fees every time they have a new edit of the car it goes yeah Mark close well I mean they're hacking their way through it they back in from Porsche you know more real interesting [Music] um okay start um this is a pretty you know kind of controversial thing but what I'm basically suggesting and that notion that you could actually do radical re-engineering

[29:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7PwmbIFDIR4&t=1740s) not just in software but also in Hardware is something that's springing up all over the place the idea that you can rewrite the basic software that runs civilization that's basically happening all the time already there's nothing radical about the idea of free software takes over the world we're sort of maybe a quarter of the way they're already and accelerating pretty quickly um I'm assuming that's some of 3D printer sorry um make so we're beginning to start hacking on the physical manufacturing capacity and right now most of the stuff coming of 3D printers is B like H interesting you know but by the time that's capable printing a chair or a server case or a a qu redesigned bag or Rubik's Cube It's Beginning to become useful by the time you could take a whole bunch of stuff throw it through a melting shred or thingy and then put it back in his feed store you begin to talk about closings some industrial Loops where you want the little Gadget you print the little Gadget you use the little Gadget you get bored with it you throw it back in the bucket that begins to sound like a bit of a break so if we could use sort of new manufacturing technology and certain new design processes and lots of open uh design methods to start redesigning the basic stuff that keeps Us Alive we could actually Fork civilization maybe it would be one house at a time maybe it would be one Village at a time maybe it' be a country at a time uh I personally think it might start at the refugee camps but there's a possibility for building a radical new architecture that does basic life support on the same kind of principles and approaches that we use in software and then shipping it into the Gap that is left by the collapse of our institutions because they weren't able to update the map fast enough it might be possible to catch a collapsing civil Iz ation and a collapsing culture with the fastest moving technology development process that Humanity has ever seen kind of Mi um so at that point we could break that problem down into a set of Fairly readily definable categories if we can figure out injury illness thirst hunger cool with heat um Communications transport workpace we've got All the Basic Essentials to keep life going and at

[31:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7PwmbIFDIR4&t=1890s) that point we'll be able to stand on our own feet make sense okay so at this point there's a couple of things we could do we could actually you know look at a whole bunch of different Technologies I could go you know show you some videos from YouTube and some other bits and pieces that illustrate specific techologies and how they might fit together or we could do a bit more analysis or I could talk through some more of this kind of theoretical stuff um what would you guys like questions all this plan how will how cost effective would be because there's not only the only analysis of society as a system but only there is Marxist analysis that from economical aspect that separates a central core how people satisfy their needs and how this expressed on society okay so very good question uh I'll give you an example that I know a little bit about which is water supp so the Richer the country is the less you pay for clean water generally speaking uh Africans who are buying Clean Water by the gallon are paying something like 13 cents per gallon of Clean Water Americans who are buying Clean Water by the ton are paying something like a gallon per 50 cubic met or something rzy like that almost free so there are economies of scale in the economy right there are some things that it makes more sense to a huge scale uh for example the hexayurt uses Plywood And I don't think there's any point that people talking about how to make their own plywood the right size for producing plywood is three or four Factor per country and you do it on a really really huge scale however I think that a lot of these very basic feed stocks are completely Beyond patent and copyright and are already produced for 2 to 5% over the cost of manufacturer so they're already extremely efficient Industries there's some variation in that but generally speaking the raw materials for most of this kind of engineering are close to as cheap as they're going to get them you know Steel stock uh well Elevate gases you know wood screws bolts

[34:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7PwmbIFDIR4&t=2040s) all that stuff is already very cheap um ecosystem service capture is the tricky part right so you have a river who's allowed to take stuff out of it for an product you have the sun who's going to sell you the kit you need to take energy from the Sun and turn it into a product what can you do with that product and how much can you sell it for the bottom line is that right now most of that stuff is so complicated in its regulation and so overp specified in the AM it that we use it's very hard to figure out what the real costs are for example if you want to run a cal off solar panel array you need something like 1,500 WS of energy which turns into something like 45,000 of equipment to be able to run a cattle on the other hand you could heat the cattle from wood for about 5 and it's just a massively more efficient way of generating heat but you can't run your computer off a kettle for that into just s p so when you start breaking down the water supply and the electricity Supply and the natural gas supply and even the gasoline Supply into what do we actually use it for you get some radical possible breakthroughs if you take the cities you could ban automobiles in most of the urban core and people who then feel safe bicycling to a f worker they might ride very energy efficient little scooters and mopeds but until you make a radical change like taking the automobiles back out the city there's a limit to how far you can go with bicycles because it's incredibly dangerous driving a bicycle and all those cars does this kind of make sense where the actual transformation point is where it becomes too expensive to change I think is questions okay so should we dig through some individual technological examples uh look at some technology you know here's the open source car rest this kind of stuff or should we talk a little more about the sort of bigger picture and the analysis show hands all right videos [Music]

[36:20](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7PwmbIFDIR4&t=2180s) now have something ready um I've seen their car drive oh yeah we so the uh the frame of the car is a square set Steel stock uh it's about this big and it's simple bar provides the chassis the uh skin of the car is uh carbon uh carbon fiber but it's managing in the same way you do fiberglass so what they have is a set of CNC moldes which will produce the mold for the car and then your production plant you make one of these molds are as many as you need and you do the carbon fiber process by hand so you have this carbon fiber monoco shell which is bolted directly to the steel frame and then the hydrogen system is basically an electric motor but a pretty standard kind in each wheel and then a package of driver Electronics which just sits on a set of you know metal boxes that bu to the chassis the thing is literally like a kit car there practically nothing to it uh it's also more or less silent which is really kind of cool it just kind of goes zip and it's got a hell of L of acceleration that's the hydrogen tank uh right now you buy the hydrogen from commercial suppliers but as you get more scale you actually have electrolysis stations where you take electricity particularly from wind power and you split it into hydrogen and oxygen the oxygen is a product and the hydrogen you then sell into the G the cars and there's a whole L of work about how you build a hydrogen economy where you store your electricity from wind farms in the form of hydrogen and then you use fuel cells to drive the hydrogen into the meat that you actually have these wind firms produce very dirty electricity and it's a total pain in the ass turning Wind Farm electricity into National wind electricity but it's actually pretty easy to turn Wind Farm electricity into hydrogen then store it in tanks for transport and other applications reasonable and you've seen uh bits and

[38:50](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7PwmbIFDIR4&t=2330s) pieces about things like open source bicycles made of bamboo and cardboard slowly people are working towards those kind of things bicycles are a bit tricky because they're very very precise machines but slowly slowly slowly they're getting easier um any questions about the car yes yeah um I heard that the the most difficult part of theing is actually the hyen tank uhhuh as far as I've heard um they were thinking about a hybrid uh version of river Syle using a Hybrid engine but as far as I understood the owners would uh actually buy the car and rent the engine H yeah it's um actually um how do you say would be a temporary solution so you would use a hybrid ah I see I engine for a while yeah until hyrogen was introduced in a massive scale okay since now have a hydrogen massive scale it's a little bit stupid to buy a car that runs on hydrogen so as far as C it was supposed to be like that I don't know now that happen because I think that the engineering the car uh in a massive quantities hasn't really been F issued I just can't go and buy simple car right now absolutely absolutely the the problems that they've been having are largely about how you get a completely new uh system ecology started so if we saw a complicated nasty war in the Middle East and the price of oil went up to around 500 a barrel River simple goes from being kind of difficult to being a hell of all easier than running diesel um but until you have some kind of external kick to the system it's basically uh sort of a hot house flour you know it will grow quite nicely in a greenhouse and maybe you can set up a special deal where you have a gasoline

[41:20](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7PwmbIFDIR4&t=2480s) Refinery and there's a bunch of hydrogen coming off the site you can have cheap and you know you sort of hack it into existence but it's very clear that if You' got some kind of event that pushed the price of gasoline up this stuff then instead of being under the gasoline curve is now over it and suddenly it becomes fully viable in the commercial Marketplace it's clear that you could do this you could scale it they're pretty easy to make there'd be a ton of employment from making the Sledge but until you have a commercial incentive capital is in order toate the shift but if we had same organizations that were charging a reasonable price for the carbon emissions from our standard V Vehicles this would be much cheaper than a regular car the reason we can't get to this technology is because the institutions are pounding the hell out we're doing the wrong thing s a tough tough tough thing also can in simple lp car with L LPG modification instead of putting a the these one that have to cook these shfs M mhm instead of put this gas use hydrogen can is it possible to use over LPG technology okay the the issue is vehicle weight so an ordinary car wears about 2 tons and the engine has about 45 Kow of generation capacity so if you want to use hydrogen fuel cells and similar things you need a very lightweight car but the fuel cell has to be so large but it makes the car too expansive basically how it works you have to redesign the whole system simultaneous yeah because here in Greece there are many businesses that convert petrol based uh cars using this type of Gap instead of putting this type of gas when put hydrogen the engine burn it yes burn it it basically it just doesn't work economically the hydrogen is too expensive in that situation but if you can make it in your home mhm the hydrogen or locally into your home just byy wind bill or using this the simple electricity and make your own fuel I think it's much cost effectively very simpler to think too close to us you you make your

[43:50](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7PwmbIFDIR4&t=2630s) home fuel put it in your car and run do your daily job and if you want to travel far then this is the problem M for big distances over kilm yes that makes sense I think you're still going to find it's very expensive to burn the hydrogen rather than use it in a fuel cell but I don't know the numbers you could be right so do you guys know about a project called open source ecology you heard of it so the open source ology guys you know have a very very comprehensive approach to this right they want to build something like 60 machines and the critical distinction between the approach they're taking and the approach that I'm taking is that the open source ecology guys want to be able to build all the machines using the machines that they built yeah and this is an architectural decision so in my model of how we go about this we assume that in the first step you're going to be able to use preex existing stock materials so you can buy the square section steel to make the riv simple you can buy the panel material to make it heier you can still buy solar panels and that's quite an assumption but it's a reasonable assumption in a lot of ways um the open source enology guys want to bootstrap all the way up to full self replication total system Independence on the first jump and one of the questions I have with that is what's the minimum level of skill require to operate that whole system there's no incrementalism in it so if it

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Continues in https://guptaoption.com/texts/322-2.md (part 2 of 2).
End of [322] Vinay Gupta at the Athens Hackerspace, 2012 September 2, part 1 of 2. Its connections are at the top of this file; the map is https://guptaoption.com/llms.txt.