# STAR-TIDES Talk at FAHUM 08 (part 1 of 2)

> One source from the archive of Vinay Gupta's work at guptaoption.com, as plain text for AI agents: [331], 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, 2012-05-04 (YouTube upload date), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ArOsc47wX1o. 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): Core of the development front: whole-system life support for people displaced for years.
- Career works it belongs to:
  - 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)
  - The Private Humanitarian Company (2010): One-page sketch of a company modeled on private military companies, using operations and logistics talent... (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:
  - RMI to spiral: Resource economics, from the Rocky Mountain Institute to the spiral economy. (through a work suggested by machine)
  - social enterprise: Enterprises that turn money into social capital and back: the capital conversion matrix from the Rocky Mountain... (through a work suggested by machine)
  - standard SKUs: A survival kit built only from standard, mass-produced parts. (through a work suggested by machine)
- Topics: STAR–TIDES / Starfish — distributed humanitarian knowledge networks (74%); Distributed infrastructure — integrated utilities and thermal engineering (21%)
- Distinctive terms here, against the whole archive: TIDES (7 here; 34 sources in all, earliest dated 2002, 5 undated); SleepBreeze (2 here; 10 sources in all, earliest dated 2002); Afghanistan (3 here; 27 sources in all, earliest dated 2009, 1 undated); refugees (7 here; 84 sources in all, earliest dated 2002, 3 undated); water purification (2 here; 17 sources in all, earliest dated 2002, 3 undated); communications (6 here; 81 sources in all, earliest dated 2006, 5 undated); Singapore (3 here; 39 sources in all, earliest dated 2009); supply chain (6 here; 92 sources in all, earliest dated 2006, 4 undated); Amory Lovins (1 here; 6 sources in all, earliest dated 2006); STAR-TIDES (2 here; 24 sources in all, earliest dated 2002, 5 undated)
- Importance: core-text score 0.41 (1.00 is the top), number 162 of the 729 sources it scored, the research build's measure of substance, importance and innovation
- Related sources:
  - [270] [Hope For The World (2017)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/270.md): close in content (cosine 0.96)
  - [727] [Undergraduate Lecture Series 2024: Vinay Gupta & Bryan... (2024)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/727.md): close in content (cosine 0.95)
- On the same works, just before: [354] [The Future We Deserve - 2 (2012)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/354.md); [240] [The Future We Deserve — Introduction (2012)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/240.md); [210] [The Future We Deserve (2012)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/210.md)
- On the same works, just after: [321] [Vinay Gupta talking at FreeAndReal / The Telaithrion... (2012)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/321.md); [322] [Vinay Gupta at the Athens Hackerspace, 2012 September 2 (2012)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/322.md); [408] [H4D2 review (2012)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/408.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: STAR-TIDES Talk at FAHUM 08, video, 2012-05-04, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ArOsc47wX1o; in Vinay Gupta's archive at guptaoption.com, source [331], https://guptaoption.com/texts/331.md.

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

## Passages, part 1 of 2
[0:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ArOsc47wX1o&t=0s) the average day in the refugee camp these days is about how long sometimes years I don't over seven years the average day so in that environment the tents and things of that that work right after the disaster is not your long-term solution and Military involved or not so because of the bureaucratic there's no one organization that's looking at all of these DOD will look at this piece and D J that state look that so this is a coalition we've got people from Netherlands to Singapore I'm from National Fence University uh we have people from Engineers that borders basically college students and graduate students joh San Diego State danic University in Singapore American Red Cross National School search and rescue it's so it's a broad military non-military Po and we're looking at seven in shelter water power integrated combustion and solar cooking heating lighting cooling sanitation and lots of information Communications Technologies the origin of this is the military logisticians came to us and said look when we deploy we military deploy to these environments all we have to bring is the tightly integrated Deployable mpec Systems that are already committed to operation plans and on custody cards so we have to give them back end so can you guys think of things that are low cost appropriate to the stress population and Expendable so leave behind at the end right so that's what we're trying to do so for example here show this is $340 retail at Home Depo it's called a hex think Mongolia year in the form of a hexag because the panels are twice as wide as they high if you cut them on the diagonal triangles L War locking the roof of the hexagon so you can assemble this in the field with nothing more than knife and tape some tight end um this is something Rotary Club does called a shelter box and it includes not 10 also in about a 30in by 30in box uh sleeping bags cooking utensils mosquito Nets things like that for 10 people plus water PA for Dan and this is about

[2:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ArOsc47wX1o&t=150s) $1,000 shipping anywhere in the world but importantly by a rotary Chan don't get wrapped up in the corruption of the local government the bureaucracy of the Chan this is called a uniform and it's a collapsible shelter accordion shelter which took us about 8 minutes to just kind of pop open and the beauty of this is it has a floor very so uh you if you want to set something up quick in these one $225 we've been doing weather testing in this stuff this winter and this is actually coming in fact you can get this with different Ultra violent treatments and so you can either have one year 3 year 5 year s year Ultra violent after which it rage to bi R of dust doesn't leave a 20,000 year plastic scar on the landscape so these are kind of some of the shelter options one of the things that USAID offer a very strong what they call the local material St so you don't want to fly in all kinds of stuff it's not native to the area and after a disaster especially you like to put the people to work you building so this is a $70 manand operated brickmaker from Zimbabwe and so one of the a idea said is that star times could help the US military introduce these kinds of ideas into their discussions with counterpart so the military would think yeah you know building capacity of my country forom development is part of my mission or for disaster whatever along with mis they see that as a big so we're trying to water one they're different models here because the model for stabilization and reconstruction in a city like fua is different from the model of refugee camps in dar4 is different than major disasters in the ands but as a general principle with regard to infrastructure if you can keep the owner of the infrastructure and the protector of the infrastructure and the user of the infrastructure is the same person you're by and large better off than splitting them up so the problem obvious in rack is the power grid is owned by one group of people it's protected by somebody else and used by some so in the case of water this is a black plastic bag cble W if you can get water to about 65°

[5:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ArOsc47wX1o&t=300s) centigrade and hold it there for there for say 6 8 hours you will kill all sorts of nasty stuff like eoli and hepatitis A and Cha and tyo there's a little bees beeswax melts at 67° and so inside the cap of this thing beeswax indicators you can see right away if the water got hot so if you have a really nice well through Sweet Water but you pump it into a bucket of unknown uh quls you may still be not well off in this case you're pasteurizing both the water and the contain alternatively you don't use black this solar cover made out of cardboard rooming for and they're actually making these in some of the African refugee camps women are using them to keep make money this will get aart to about 275° F and and Pat mardle who's been with us on a lot of these has cooked us baked cakes cooked wonderful chicken stews all sort you can cook just as well in here as you can [Applause] enough in addition obviously the sun doesn't channel so these are combustion stoves basically made out of uh old tin cans and through the combination of the solar plus the high efficiency thermal and then something called a retained heat bass Wier bass pal FR or something like that you can produce fuel 75 to 80% over open so in a place like dark around the camp we have this increasingly large circle of deforestation and it's the women are are most at risk they have to go out and gather the firewood and things like that I mean cutting back to Wood is really big deal um so and you can also use the sun to pasteurize the water if you don't have have the Black Flag so we're trying to get ideas that cross infrastructures you're not just dealing with whole systems thing uh the energy model originally was an 80 W solar panel powering ablea batteries these are Chargers that'll recharge AA battery about 15 minutes another model is you give each family the batteries and the charger and this takes about a day to recharge but

[7:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ArOsc47wX1o&t=450s) you give everybody six or eight batteries and they can choose to use it for lighting or for cooling or for cooking fans whatever you want to use it for with that the LED it gives you not only bright light but really uh high efficiency you get hundreds of hours for all the battery and then if you take it at night and shine it in this thing with all the facets on it you can actually light up a whole pent um so yeah how much does say the solar battery charger this little charger much is that called so that one was about $555 uh off the internet we didn't try to get just bulk discounts these are about $10 and actually you this turned we learned a lot in doing this the way this originally went it was DC out of the solar panel into a static converter to converted back into AC AC to the uh battery charger was converted back into DC so probably lost half the power and the conversion So eventually wind up just clip on I was just thinking that you know batteries kind like be recharged so many times solar car Ray kind of expensive so rayac uh which has a charger actually give you 50 Cycles which is better than most uh in addition the model here is the model we started with is Imagine place like their four there isn't any alternative and what you don't want to do is set up the big central power plant on wires all over the camp when the infrastructure distributed so the model here was doublea is the energy source to everybody and it turns out the doublea's has been a lot more research done than aaa's in terms of getting energy density out and things like that so that's why uh now the other piece I know you've seen is this dramatic Improvement and solars over the past 2 3 months with some now that are printable on inkjet printers they actually generate the solar panels through an inkjet printer with special in and that looks like it's going to cut the cost from Factor about four uh and this is just routinely coming down the most exciting thing actually is Korean researchers last announced last year uh that potentially by 2012 2015 expected to lead to 10 C per watt solar panels so a house roughly

[10:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ArOsc47wX1o&t=600s) is 10 Kow so 10 cents a watt is $1,000 for taking your house hey completely off the grid GRE and uh uh taking your house completely off the grid and that's a game changer that now lets plugin hybrids be uh be plausible put a windmill on top of your house the batteries in the basement and really now you can begin putting power out of each house back changes the game um so talked about the cooking uh heating this is kind of interesting last year or not couple years ago in Europe there was a um heat wve and a whole bunch of elderly people just died in their homes so this British guy got this idea for something called SleepBreeze so a a roomer just plug in just hold it down my technal advisor anyway a uh a room air conditioner is about 2,000 Watts a room fan is about 80 watts and this called a SleepBreeze it's 4 Watts what you do is you lie down put this on the bed next to you or on the floor next to your mat and it just blows the air right on your body again powered by doublea battery is going to get the energy model here is do as much and double A as you can so when you're trying to go to sleep I'm told C that it's helpful to you need to lower the body temperature by about 2° before people fall asleep and so then hot weather this let you do that then you fall asleep you don't care you're been warm again for but that's kind of the point here and there's a little timer on it so it shuts off got about 6 hours total office um you want to know how much that cost I think it's about uh 40 or 50 it's about right right now an early production run it's about 40 50 bucks is the idea to have this on all night no no there's a timer and it and it actually shuts off after I don't know what it is 20 minutes 30 minutes something it's help it's to help people get to sleep get to sleep and then it shuts off what you want to about all night probably r all night uh I suppose the ideal model is somebody goes to sleep next person takes it and goes to sleep next person takes it and whatever what would be like the targeted Market um well there's a whole batch I mean one could be

[12:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ArOsc47wX1o&t=750s) campers uh it was actually designed as an emergency system for people who had elderly relatives who might get caught in the heat wave like kill all those people in Europe uh and so I would think the you know the campers and the elderly is why would think of as the principal Market here but you could also imagine it for refugees and people like that but it's it's not a protection meure it's to help get to see right right well it can also be used to just uh in extreme hot environments to to keep your body temperature low low enough that you don't s sustain damage to your organ systems yeah compareed with compared with a room air conditioner or a room fan it's a fraction of a wattage and it also runs an AC if one of that so it depends on the context yeah so the um the biggest weakness we have actually in start TI to this point of Sanitation uh it's really surprising how little good research there is on on sanitation for stressed environments you got porta potties things like that but that's not what you're going to use out in darur and composting toil look really expensive and in places like Myanmar now we have Flooding at these Frenching tools so you know what's the answer don't know this actually an area where we need to do some serious research turns out the people in Singapore actually some of the best work so a lot of information Communications Technologies uh we had our first demonstration in this last year we started with cold dark quiet field and one of the things to remember is that unclassified information and the ability to share it is not a nice to have adjunct to kinetic phase if you can't communicate collaborate translate engage effective civil military Mission Partners outside the B of B you cannot achieve the social political economic goals for which the military force this is not a nice to have thing so let me take this walk very would you continue well um a very timely appearance here by V Gupta who is the inventor of a number of these systems including the hex Earth uh uh lowcost structure and some other things here so why don't I let vene take it from here and is there a question uh about actually the it's a shelter what material was that actually um well this this was built in America and in the states in the American supply chain they

[15:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ArOsc47wX1o&t=900s) have an enormous quantity of this material which is used for insulating walls so this was just bought at Home Depot for about $15 a sheet um the reason that we be interested in building this kind of temporary shelter in America from materials in the supply chain is catastrophic disaster for example if you had something like the bay wake you can see half a million people homeless if you had a nuclear event you could see 10 to 20 million people this and this material is used so much that there's to build shelters for about half a million people a day just from what's in the supply chain before you step up production and you know you take tape you can use you know there's a very big tape it's kind of specialized or you can use ordinary partial tape and you know people can be trained how to build one of these shelters in about half an hour and then after that we can produce a shelter an hour so you can imagine enormous volunteer teams coordinating to rehouse people after a disaster like this which is very hard to do otherwise you know the the FEMA shelters cost something like $2 billion to purchase for housing for 150,000 people and it's very expensive to stuff pile enormous shelter resources so it's not those are not great materials they don't produce a permanent shelter they've got lots of claws but it will stand in a 60 mph wind you can build it quickly and if something horrible happens you have an option um in uh South America the supply chain for these kind of materials is not so strong so you have to improvise with things like plywood and you can build smaller shelters that way and maybe use Nails instead of rope you have to adapt the design but the building is made from standard 4x8 sheets so the walls are just whole sheets and the roof is made of half sheets where you cut it on the diagonal and then assemble it into the roof triangle so anybody can be taught to do this it's very easy if you have you know a table so you can just run these things out so that's the hex so that takes us through through pretty much all the systems of the seven infrastructures that we're focused on currently um maybe it's good to see what questions you have so what's your background environmental engineer or uh well let's see video games I used to be a software engineer and uh video You Know video games are very much about triangle meshes right 3D Graphics which is all the same mathematics as gdic does and when you try and make a GD Z doome that can be mass produced for refugees you wind up simplifying and simplifying and

[17:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ArOsc47wX1o&t=1050s) simplifying so that's where the structure came from all of the infrastructure you know the the lights and the solar cougers and all the rest of the stuff the idea of assembling the whole system uh comes from a place called the Rocky Mountain Institute which Builds on the work of a man called Buckminster 4 and um in about 1935 Buckminster 4 filed a pattern for a self-contained apartment building a five-story apartment building that would be made of steel tubes FL blown in by Airship and it had plans for self-contained toilets power generation water purification in like 1935 and it was a practical design it could have been manufactured over the nobody ever did so this idea of packaging buildings together with all their infrastructure has been around for a long time largely in the environmentalist world but I came in it from a very different angle I came in it from kind of energy policy and that um have we talked through the whole thing about whole systems design have you been introduced to this idea we just hinted at it and some some of the Cross integration of the systems so the the core of whole systems design is that you cover everything necessary to get a breakthrough in performance if you're you know a dollar we and a day day weight and a dollar short you don't get a breakthrough you can put all of this work into a system and you can make Improvement after Improvement after Improvement but if there's one thing left holding you back you won't to all performance so whole systems are about going through every single piece of a system and making sure that it works towards your long-term performance goal and this is called whole systems thinking so in the case of all this Refugee stuff the goal is very much to be able to take populations rapidly provide for all their needs and then when it's possible to resettle them because the disaster is over or piece is broken out you want this ability to Fan them back out in small groups or individual households so if you set up a large camp and you provide reverse verus mous water purification and a large generator when the time comes to send these people home you're sending them back nothing now it's very problematic so the idea um came from uh an event run at the Rocky Mountain Institute including participation from Dr Eric rason and their idea was you need some way of basically providing for the uh refugees at sort of household level so that when you get an opportunity to send them back you can send them back to their own Villages one household at a time and you transport their equipment with them so if you gave them one of these to purify their water when the

[20:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ArOsc47wX1o&t=1200s) time comes to send them back they take it with them so they're not bound by the infrastructure so you don't have the same pressure uh against the providing them with decent Services you know there's a lot of political pressure in the refugee business to try and stop making the refugees too comfortable so you can eventually actually want to go back right and you know there's an enormous amount of fear of permanence in this so by making it both high quality and also inherently transitory you have this idea that you provide for the refugees initially at quite a high standard of living they they'll be doing better if they have this equipment as refugees than many of them were before they came because they'll have clean water they'll have light to redy all this kind of stuff but you don't have the same Spectre of permanence because as soon as you send them home this goes from being humanitarian relief to being development Aid and that's a key transition you know the the it was the case that humanitarian Ru very separate systems and now I think it's clear that the technology permits us to actually integrate humanitarian R and development as a single system so when you have a disaster and there's all of this money flowing through the system to you know immediately help people you put in tools which will last for a long time and you put in tools which they themselves can buy more of when they need them um so so mentioned the rocket maybe know rock this is a group you probably want to get to know more about it's called RMI located in snow Mass Colorado and the founder is a guy named Amory Lovins who's been a recipient one of the MacArthur genius Rants and things like that he has been a proponent for a long time of something called natural capitalism which basically says uh if you can maintain the same amount of output but half your input your product your profits go up so there's nothing wrong with AAP perspective in being environmentally friendly AG green you can actually make a lot of money by doing this and by the way you get all collateral benefits plan like that so it's actually uh has been an advocate of growth under these conditions for actually reducing the amount of input uh per unit of output uh he's also got a very interesting piece uh about two years ago called winning the oil end game which basically is how to get America off oil uh out of profit uh with no u get us off high our I just go to websites very interesting we something

[22:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ArOsc47wX1o&t=1350s) for you to think about is he has asked a question what is real security suppose you would Define security as Freedom From Fear of privation and Freedom From Fear of attack those two things for all people on the planet it really changes the calculus as to where you would make your National Security investment dollars if that was the method that we trying think about anyway um do you have any other questions kind what kinds of things are you interested in um how do you implement or how do you decide where to go to implement is does somebody contact you or do you offer your services let me take the first part of that uh so the although we have a broad coalition involved in this the coordination of star Tides is largely being done right now at M fence University in conjunction with Partners like the hexayurt project runs so our customers tend to be at this point US Government which is to say the combatant commanders for do the military and usaid off so I've gone to the commanders of the Southern command the northern command which is continent the United States can actually uh and African and said What scenario keeps you up at night so ad breas and the southern command commanders come back and said major hurricane in Western Central America with lots of homeless and floods and that's now been refined down to Nicaragua in October November roughly 180,000 homeless so the model here is how do you take the start gues infrastructures and decide which mix of them would be most appropriate for the scenarios the customers are asking about uh so I think Northern command is going to come back we just say one of two things either uh earthquake on the new madid fall to winter or a natural or magn disaster the natural Capital Region Washington Africa command is probably going to come back and say uh drought in subsaharan Africa are lots of displaced people so what we find is none of these

[25:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ArOsc47wX1o&t=1500s) Solutions none of these Solutions is going to be right for everyone the Hat the Earth because it could be produced in this model in very large numbers out of the US commercial supply chain might be actually a good way to get people out of the elements in say Northern California earthquake or New Madrid earthquake and what but this is not long-term shelter of the American people this might be a dramatic increase in the standard of living for people in darur but it violates the local materials doctr um so we we've been looking a lot in the last set of 72 hours at communications infrastructures for ngos in mymar what would you want to deploy to get internet connectivity and Wi-Fi clouds and cell phone powers and that what it turns out in tropical rainy Seasons you don't want to employ KU Band Satellite ter teral because they're too much rain phase you want to deploy cand terminals that leads you to okay only these satellites are ones you could use and not others so the question is what is the mix for scenario a scenario B scenario C of these and how do you analyze it what's a structured way to say under what criteria will we evaluate a shelter to see whether it's suitable for ABC or B and then the next phase of STAR-TIDES about a year would actually be how would you test it we get a field somewhere and blow wind on it and drop rain on it and things like that and see how it work so so the answer is we try to go to our customers and I have no problem my guess is they probably 40 or 50 generic scenarios that'll handle most everything earthquake in the andies is about the same as earthquake in Neal is about the same as uh except in Chile you might have lots of good telecommunications and power but you wouldn't have that in boan and whatever so how do you how do you balance that if you're in a pure refugee camp situation then the's model of one infrastructure per family might work if you're doing stabilization reconstruction in belua where there's already a city of 300,000 and some infrastructure around some different model so we're trying to get to ultimately is a series of templates that will let us come in and analyze a customer saying help I'm in this situation you're never going to see a STAR-TIDES flag in the field handing out MREs our goal is to provide reach back knowledge on demand for l decision makers and folks working in the field so

[27:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ArOsc47wX1o&t=1650s) whether it's the combatant commander whether it's an NGO whether it's the president of a country whether it's the Latin America the American Union what's the term interamerican uh what no no just okay political anyway whether it's African Union or whatever uh whoever has the line responsibilities we're there to support uh and um George M found Pro what was the second for question how do we get it yeah it's this is also one of the places where I me there's a lot of history to this question that you know Technologies like the sort and this is a roughly 15 or 20 year old technology and right now something like 5 million people a year die because they don't have access to Queen drinking water and if you do the numbers you know this is not an expensive item if you make it with slightly higher spec materials it could last for Generations this was just your metal sheet and you cleaned up and it got dirty could last for Generations 5 million people a year die this way it's a it's a holocaust a year and you get about the same kind of numbers when you start looking at things like uh efficient wood stoves the smoke inhalation from people cooking over open fires accounts for about 5 million people a year and when you add up all of these little failures of infrastructure and look at the total public health impact it's enormous it's 20 or 30 million people a year the other Factor that's driving all of this is that the technology is getting better and I think this is a very important thing to remember when you're thinking about the future um I mean this is an example of a very simple system this is Rural electrification right I mean you know some rechargeable batteries and a little solar panel and a very very bright and very cheap flashlight the whole thing is about $35 but 10 years ago the LED that was in this did not exist and instead of getting 6 hours of light from two batteries you would have gotten about 30 minutes the rechargeable batteries were five times the price and the solar panel was three times the price So what youve had in the past 10 years is this system got you know 30 times cheaper or better and the same kind of process is happening to Communications technology it's happening to a big electrical infrastructure um there are no solar panels which are cheaper than coal plants are so what we're going to see is this enormous rotation in the way that the world works as suddenly the poor and people in distressed situations have

[30:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ArOsc47wX1o&t=1800s) access to a phenomenal new level of technological support and we're talking about 4.5 billion poor people going through something that looks like an industrial revolution so in the model uh waterborne diseases when here's different numbers let's say it's let's just say it's 3 and a half million people in the year that's the equivalent of on the order of 10 people a day that's on the order of 30 full 747s every day crashing killing everyone on board just to water Point diseases of course never meets our threshold so these kind of small changes can just make enormous differences and those differences will come up to the social level as well I mean if you think about all the political unrest and anger that there is in the world about poverty on one hand these technologies will lift people out of the worst consequences of poverty your children start living you don't lose like one in 10 under the age of five on the other hand when you've got access to ICT your perspective on history and on the world expands very rapidly so with regard to ICT um we talked about the information sharing but in a disaster uh Cals lift and power situational awareness and the networks to share it are often thought of the techie as techie adjuncts to the major musle rouers delivering F shelter and water but in fact without the situation where ability to share it it's the critical Ena of everything else that happen you don't know where the roads are out you don't know where the bridges are washed out you don't know how to get the food the airport to the flooded areas so this stuff needs to go in the first trunch after disaster not in somewhere deep in the recovery phase like a normally has thought of this among the be so you talk about Gator at all this is a satellite thing this fabul it's an inflatable satellite dish 77 lb fits in a duffel bag throw it the King Air flat whever you want it when it blows up inside there's a membrane you put differen of pressure on the membrane and because of the differ of pressure the membrane becomes parabolic it's reflective screw on the feed Horn of the focal point and within an hour of the time you get up there you've got uh 512 up two Megs down 21 connectivity basically anywhere in the world and and the Ericson rig next door if you connect it to the other end of this will then take the back hole bandwidth and then turn it into cell phone access and hdps

[32:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ArOsc47wX1o&t=1950s) so you can actually run computers off it so you got this potential to very quickly turn up put up a mask put up the satellite and it's you know people have their basic Communications and as the technology continues to evolve that kind of stuff is going to become more and more possible and more and more uh more and more useful so we've been doing a lot of work in Nahar province in eastn Afghanistan or onal alad there are 50,000 students in the University of JAL they have a 256k dialup internet connection for 50,000 people right now last month we got a gator and now all of a sudden they have you know T1 size access still not great for 50,000 people but it's a qualitatively different thing now they can actually access the web download video and one of the things that's just astonish and this is for your generation to try to change is if you look at the priority it's $99,500 a month to get the band RI off the gator probably $3500 a month off a different type of antenna with all the money we're spending in Afghanistan neither USAID nor the American Embassy nor the government Cabo thinks that that's a worthwhile investment to get information to the next generation of advans and so why not how do we change that thing one of the the core Trends in all of this is that power is moving down the pyramid and towards the edges and I know this is a big part of us DOD thinking but it's also happening for individuals you know once you've got you know in 20 years you're going to see kids all over the developing world who got the equivalent of University education watching the free videos that MIT is putting online right now and the implications of that for the way that the world is going to be transformed by these Technologies are huge except there's a there's a pessimistic downside that and that is that people tend to congregate with those who share compes and so whereas the internet connectivity will give you access to knowledge of the world it might also let you align with those who want to do e madrasas or want to say the Holocaust never happened or line up with whatever Serbian Nationals and so it's a double-edged sword and the Technologies enabler can be good or bad and offer what Ben is talked about and also enable Alca so how

[35:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ArOsc47wX1o&t=2100s) do you find the right balance so let me just stop go back to you guys what's your major international relations SP are all of you international [Music] relations what about regions you ever Regional special Latin America Latin okay so what have you seen here here that's changed your thinking about anything you have to P at all I guess my question would be who funds this what's your sort of vehicle for implementation so the first demonstration we did in start ta took less than $20,000 wor government money we got over $800,000 of private sector engagement companies just brought their stuff there so we like show this off it's kind of cool so we're actually working now with Sou command on some of the research and development work that uh one H Pao was doing uh in terms of uh you know taking some of these Technologies from just prototype stage to some next level of development in addition we've been talking with some of the folks in US Army South who actually run the exercises watchest in R&D for example next year in P the question is could we deliver say five or six full sets of integrated infrastructure maybe different types and uh usar so would get some Nagin to offer them food and things having they come live in them for a couple weeks and see how they work and this is a I mean a very important part of this is these things have to be fuel tested you know a lot of these technologies have been around individually for a long time but the assembled whole systems are relatively recent when I put together the first one of these ultr lowcost integrated infrastructure packages in 2003 there was nothing that had been done like that before and even now because it's such a different perspective and such a different looking at things both the hexayurt project and star Tides both have acute difficulties finding funding and let's say s yes mean we're not an app just organization we don't buy anything what we do is provide the reach back information to Southern command or Uso or somebody like that who has the money to buy it and they say okay I'll do that and I want $10,000 ,000 of them and I want them by this time do that so let's

[37:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ArOsc47wX1o&t=2250s) say they wanted to buy enough of these to handle 10,000 refugees into uh quantana that might be stockpiled by the government the keep a warehouse roll them out and use them for this in the new MADD earthquake model the US commercial supply chain Lowe's Home Depot whatever makes enough of these things to house about 500,000 people a day a lot of these things built in the system so maybe the best model there is instead of having the is 13 boards I need to have two lows of this tape and I need to have tie downs things like that Home Depot stocks and tex year is a line item so you just go inside and want 10,000 and that's something that can happen globally as well one of the things we're working on is uh identifying all the areas where there's enough of an industrial base to make these in a material that suits the climate you know like if you're in you know Northern Pakistan you need some kind of hard plastic or something like this so that you get this ability to very quickly pull resources from the main Industrial Supply chains and use them for humanitarian purposes and that again gets back to the ICT right I there's no way that you can possibly organize those kinds of things and maintain a s global map of Readiness without an enormous sort of electronic uh Communications Network to so everything we're learning uh we're publishing on our website and we're trying to start.net and we're trying to publish it as a Wiki so that um you know if somebody says well GE I did you instructions in Step N9 before step 7 works better they can come back and post that and the next people to do it and see what the so it's designed to be in kind of interactive Field Manual so startide itself doesn't take a lot of funding buying the stuff for it stti is basically supposed to you look at finding all these things you can put together a system that just throws this whole idea yeah it's a research effort to look at the possibility so maybe we find you know 110 different types of shels say and maybe of those only 15 are suitable for the kind of situations we're looking at it maybe up that only three work in Nicaragua and a different three work in uh New Madrid fault and something else Works in darur so we just kind of provide advice to the customer cocom or Aid or whatever that says this looks like a reasonable collection of systems we're going to be trying to do whole systems thinking cross infrastructure so you know if if

[40:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ArOsc47wX1o&t=2400s) we have the earthquake and niaga at the beginning of the rainy season uh somebody says well don't bother to send me solar cookers for a while because there's no sun um so star Tides is what does that well star Tides will provide some advice star tid doesn't ship any Star no they provide the advice well the things that will work in this reg essentially we present options so you're a bunch of social scientists that look at understanding the region and what their needs well we all try to tie the technology to these situations the three what we find in these situations is you need five things you need a capability you need a social network um in 2000 you need a you finish capability social network a the incorporation for military of something called TTP you know what TTP is tactics techniques and procedures and the problem is you can have all this great policy but in order to let Lieutenant Wells or Sergeant Schwarz uh deliver actually do something in the field it has to gotten down far enough so this is okay to share this information with this without having to go ask the colonel every time so capability social network doctorine policy GTP there may be some legal challenges we'll talk about that in a minute and you have to have enough money to deploy this stuff quickly doesn't have to be the whole budget it has to be enough to get these in the first airplane to fly the where they going the social network is you know the sociology is about 10 times more important than technology in most of these areas provided you've got the right mix of infrastructures um in in tsunami when I was still in Pentagon I sponsored the appointment of three people to Southeast Asia one was a Navy dock one was a civilian dock one was a retired Navy pilot the two docks went to the UN leaz on sale in Jakarta where they were agreed with the process hey man we were together in the Congo we were together in Koso we were together in Afghanistan the social networks have been established you didn't have the you know can I trust this guy or not the pilot could go on board the carrier get high fives hey man you know let's go to ready room and talk TI 3 days later when they got together they found that the carrier was prohibited by some combination of policy or doctrine or GTP or something with sharing information outside the military with anyone who didn't

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Continues in https://guptaoption.com/texts/331-2.md (part 2 of 2).
End of [331] STAR-TIDES Talk at FAHUM 08, part 1 of 2. Its connections are at the top of this file; the map is https://guptaoption.com/llms.txt.