# STAR-TIDES briefing from Vinay Gupta (part 2 of 2) > One source from the archive of Vinay Gupta's work at guptaoption.com, as plain text for AI agents: [335], part 2 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/.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=Kfm1Y74ghFE. 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): A full early briefing on providing life support when states fail. - Career works it belongs to: - Hexayurt infrastructure kit (2003): A household kit around the Hexayurt: water-purifying bottles, dry toilets, efficient stoves and solar lights. - Resilience and Opportunity: Effective Tools for Victory in Fourth Generation Wars? (2006): Briefing arguing that insurgencies end when fighters can go home to a living, so distributed... - disastr.org (2007): One-page plan to house disaster refugees with host families: insulation board from the building industry,... - Networked Domestic Disaster Response (2007): Plan for evacuating millions to tens of millions of US citizens. - Nuclear / mass evacuation (2007): Plan for millions of US refugees after a disaster, epidemic or nuclear attack. - STAR-TIDES (2007): Helped start STAR-TIDES, a National Defense University project on supporting populations under stress. - 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. - cyber and defense: Security work for defense clients, built on one idea: set rivals to check each other. Resilience and Opportunity in... - fiction draws on: The work that fed the fiction. - 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. - Topics: STAR–TIDES / Starfish — distributed humanitarian knowledge networks (65%); Engineering as political action — Fuller and material provision (12%) - Distinctive terms here, against the whole archive: TIDES (15 here; 34 sources in all, earliest dated 2002, 5 undated); gasification stove (6 here; 8 sources in all, earliest dated 2002); distributed infrastructure (9 here; 22 sources in all, earliest dated 2002, 5 undated); FEMA (5 here; 11 sources in all, earliest dated 2002); refugees (13 here; 84 sources in all, earliest dated 2002, 3 undated); NDU (2 here; 4 sources in all, earliest dated 2008); Iraq (6 here; 45 sources in all, earliest dated 2006, 2 undated); clean water (4 here; 30 sources in all, earliest dated 2006, 1 undated); four billion poor (1 here; 3 sources in all, earliest dated 2012); Six ways (3 here; 30 sources in all, earliest dated 2008, 5 undated) - The earliest dated source in this archive for (undated sources may be earlier): Spiral; four billion poor - Importance: core-text score 0.58 (1.00 is the top), number 50 of the 729 sources it scored, the research build's measure of substance, importance and innovation - Related sources: - [137] [STAR-TIDES (2007)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/137.md): same career work: STAR-TIDES - [68] [STAR-TIDES | The Bucky-Gandhi Design Institution (2007)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/68.md): same career work: STAR-TIDES - 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: [327] [Papa Bill's Stew-Stick Jam - Marmaduke Dando - Second Song (2012)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/327.md); [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) ## 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 briefing from Vinay Gupta, video, 2012-05-04, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kfm1Y74ghFE; in Vinay Gupta's archive at guptaoption.com, source [335], https://guptaoption.com/texts/335.md. Other speakers' passages are removed, so there can be gaps. ## Passages, part 2 of 2 [45:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kfm1Y74ghFE&t=2700s) as many as you know 20 million people's worth of shelter so in an emergency context you know somebody you know blows up Boston and immediately Home Depot and Lowe's and da all begin to send as much of that material as they can lay their hands on to the area that's just outside the disaster area and you teach people to come boards in half of craft knives and take them into hexayurts and then basically you know you got guys with dier counters showers and piles of keen clothing who figure out you know which category of radioactive you're in decontaminate you and then you know give you fresh clothing so you're not carrying the radiation with you and at this point at least according to the Red Cross and the guys that I've talked to at FEMA that is the state-of-the-art plan for rehousing people after a nuclear event in America Amer uh I mean you know people have danced around the little Jigs and said oh my God this is so much better than what we have already I don't know if that's true or not because it's not like I have a clearance but um you know that's the nuclear response plan and that's been online for you know a year year and a half um so I mean that's the domestic scenario and then alongside of that you need to figure out what to do about infrastructure um The Simple Plan is that you uh pre you basically have a national reserve of people who say in the event of a disaster that displaces a lot of people you guys can put a hex in my backyard and I'll run a power cable out to it and let them use my toilet so what that gives you is the ability to take these hexayurts and piggy back them off the existing infrastructure over Supply we get so much infrastructure in the cities and particularly in the suburbs that if you had enough naal response register like that you could easily absorb 10 or 20 million people without even trying and then over the next you know 6 weeks or something like that you rapidly resettle them into regular housing again um theoretically you could do the same thing if you had a national register of all the empty Apartments practically speaking that seems to be a lot harder to get people invested in doing and I don't really understand why that is but you know that would be the more rational [47:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kfm1Y74ghFE&t=2850s) approach um so in the event that you don't want to distribute these folks into the population then you've got to provide infrastructure for them as well and if you're dealing with providing infrastructure for millions of people from a standing start there's no way you could do that without doing things like stockpiling stoves and solar cookers and all the rest of that stuff and again you know $50 to $100 per head 10 million people that you want to build a reserve for it's a few hundred million dollar it's not really a lot of money same if you want to stock pile 6 in tape it's just not really a lot of money but it hasn't been done and there's as far as we know nothing directly parallel which has been done so that's an area that you know again it's worthy of some work that might be something the ndu wants to Crunch actual numbers on and produce a fairly detailed well thought out rational plan and there are some guys in Georgia that I'm talking to at um what is it Center for Public Health and mass destruction defense uh uh I want to say University of Georgia that might be worth talking to about that um all right so I think I'm done I don't have anything else on the top of my head um I need to get you some links on how to make tape anchors and just some links to some of the other hexayurt construction videos so you can check that stuff out um and maybe we'll have another we talk about that once you've had a chance to watch the videos um questions suggestions yeah yeah I mean I I think watching the videos and then going over it in detail would be a good I will has somebody taken a note of all the things that I'm supposed to be sending people could somebody do that okay so uh tap anur brittle power the nuclear response plan um uh let's see what else is there oh the p flu paper I'll send you guys a link to as well it's even more cheerful than the nuclear response [50:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kfm1Y74ghFE&t=3000s) oh you're very welcome um there is uh one thing I just want to briefly touch on something I didn't mention um the other thing is that we got roughly 4 billion poor people you know I mean three Bill we have roughly four billion poor people um 3 billion of whom are living on less than $5 a day uh maybe two billion of whom are living on less than $2 a day so most of these people are basically in pretty much the same condition that other people would be in after a disaster you know particularly the S of $1 a day $2 a day people are essentially Living In Perpetual crisis um so one of the artificial distinctions that's been made by the ngos is the the idea that there's a difference between disaster relief and development Aid but all of this distributed infrastructure bridges that Gap this is I mean this is fundamentally if you give people a wood gasification stove a 10e build quality hexayurt you know a solar panel and a little white and a few other bits and pieces that's development Aid you just gave these people tools which will quarter their infin mortality I mean Pat knows this if you give people you know things which give them kids clean water to drink and freeze them from indoor air pollution you know their INF mortality drops like a stone if they're in an environment where they can get their hands in contraception you just killed their birth rate too and that's a few dollars per household 10 20 30 40 $50 $100 per household um and this can be done do you guys know about carawa yeah so carala is an area of South India it's got an income of about $300 per year average which means half of the people there are poorer than that [52:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kfm1Y74ghFE&t=3150s) and the life expectancy and infant mortality are within about 5% of the US levels they live maybe two years less than somebody in the US and their kids die fractionally more often on something like a 70th of the average income now the trick that they have over there is not distributed infrastructure what they have is a government which is very very tightly focused on the basics but it's incredibly successful and it shows you what you can do with a very very small budget if you apply it directly to Public Health and education as a primary Mission um my feeling is that distributed infrastructure gives us leverage on the problem of global poverty without having to have an enormous spend in getting these problems solved if us DOD actually does the work on figuring out how to do this kind of distributed infrastructure work on these very sparse budgets and the material is appropriately you know managed in terms of not having patents on it that people can't use or going all the way and putting it into the public domain and open source for information then you get into a situation where other people can come along and copy that and that can be how the developed World helps the developing World up look we figured out all this cool infrastructure stuff it's under open you know conditions you can all use it and in environments where you don't have enough uh GDP per square mile to pay for things like policing or you don't have enough gbdp per square mile to pay for things like a power grid you can still provide these vital Technologies which give you most of the Health and Welfare benefits of being in the modern world while you still remain in your village where your family have farmed since the fifth century ad so that's really the long-term game plan if we can figure this stuff out for disaster relief without invoking all kinds of expensive complicated Technologies I the quality of services is high enough that we as westers are comfortable living in it for moderately extended periods then we've come up with a solution which could be basically franchised all across the developing world you got clean water to drink you've got a great little stove you've got light to read it at night and you've got this thing that looks like a laptop works like a laptop and you watch TV on it what more do you really need I mean I I'm pretty serious about that if you had to work only 3 or 4 hours a day to maintain that lifestyle I [55:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kfm1Y74ghFE&t=3300s) think a lot of us might even choose it or at least a lot of me so that's another angle to this stuff the yeah the disaster relief thing is all very urgent and all that but at the end of the day poverty kills an ungodly number of people every year it's on the order of 20 million and if we figure this stuff out we can actually stop that within probably one or two generations you know I mean if there was a serious foreign policy push from the US government not a strategic level but at a politic political level at a diplomatic level we could probably stomp out most of the worst effects of poverty globally in 5 or 10 or 15 years of hard push and if it wasn't going to be hard push if we were just going to do the research and not do all the deployment stuff it probably no more than 5 or 10 years of research probably closer to five if it was funded at something like $50 or100 million a year and you need to spend that money very carefully right it would have to be spent on open- Source development projects rather than on paying universities to do it CU universities are big and slow and kind of expensive um but with a sea of little grants to small companies and independent researchers and particularly fast moving and efficient universi departments we could pretty much break the fundamental problems of global property inside a generation and things like the you know the NanoSolar panels these very very cheap solar panels that are coming online heard about this yeah yeah so those are significantly cheaper than Coal Power they're not on the open market yet but they're in mass production and they've sold out the first year and a half of Supply um so at that point distribut an infrastructure becomes just as efficient as conventional infrastructure in fact more efficient because you don't have to pay for the grid so if you take that and you take wireless internet on $100 laptops and all the machines which are like that that are being copied or directly to these s new cell phone platforms then you can see that the developing world is about to get electronic uh communication you know it's going to get ICT and it's going to get electricity very very r rapidly so I mean there's an argument there for putting the rest of the distributed [57:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kfm1Y74ghFE&t=3450s) infrastructure picture together and sending it out on the carrier wave of cheap electricity and cheap ICT so you get your laptop and the first thing it tells you is Hi here's a package of data prepared by the American government that tells you how to build a composting toilet how to purify your water and where to buy a gasification stove over 85% of the planet Earth here's a medical datab base here's a few other bits and pieces by the way we're very nice people if you see anybody out there going to cause any trouble for us please let us know by sending an email to this address and the tips that pan out you have some special forces guys go over there and take care of I me if you want to talk about winning the war on terror the core of that is getting all of the guys all over the world who are the eyes and ears to be willing to tell America when there's a problem and to have America be listening if we fixed Global poverty do you think it would be very easy to get together to you know do something Dreadful to America oh no the Americans are wealthy people look how they you know fix the world is that Fantastic look at all the Fantastic stuff they developed and gave away it's it's the most effective protection against terrorism you can have particularly in a Muslim context because in Islam charity is regarded as being this kind of sacred Duty so if you have the enormous huge you know colossal charitable act on the part of the US it will become extremely difficult within Islam to justify things like nuclear terrorism I mean it it theologically becomes almost impossible so you know I mean there are very there are very good political reasons for investing and distributed infrastructure research as well but I'm not sure that America has the kind of wisdom that it would take to lean on that hard enough to turn it into effective long-term solution but you know if somebody will put me in charge this is the way we will do things right okay I think we have a couple people who got got to get going okay well wonderful talking to you all um thank you for taking the time oh very welcome anytime anytime and I will send you a bunch of links to videos on he here construction and then um you know what let's follow up once you've had a chance to think about your experiences building them look at the videos of me building them [1:00:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kfm1Y74ghFE&t=3600s) and other people building them and figuring out how you know what's different what's the same and what you can learn and what we can learn and then let's do another call maybe with a couple of small models one at your end and one at my end and we can go over the real pardon me the real technical detail cuz I think that you're going to need to make some changes in how the buildings are built to make best use of that thin brown material um because the thing about that stuff is it's actually much stronger in terms of its ability to take Point loads than the insulation boards are so you can drill a hole in that stuff and put a cable tie through the hole and the hole won't just tear out the board and that means you can use cable ties to reinforce it in some ways and I think that you might find that approach gives you um a very very strong building out of you know a fairly you know different material you know it's not the tape is not really necessarily the best way of fastening those you might find that you actually get on better with wire or cable ties and then the tape is just to be waterproof and that might be worth doing a little experimenting have you been recording on your end we've got and and I have both voice and video on my end I believe Let's cross our fingers that that comes out but I think we might have the entire thing you know we'll we'll see when I hit stop whether it worked so's the best appro back over well uh at the very least I should uh compress it and uh send it to you we might also want to put it up on the Star TIDES's website because I mean that's probably the most comprehensive recorded overview of at least my perspective on the whole star Tides picture I mean I'm not don't want it to be well I mean I'm actually recording uh I have an independent recording on my camera here at least of the audio plus I've got the software plus you've got the software on your end so fingers crossed at least one of these will work okay yeah that should be good okay excellent excellent okay take care and please [1:02:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kfm1Y74ghFE&t=3750s) somebody send me a list of the stuff I'm supposed to send you all okay all right thank you take care --- End of [335] STAR-TIDES briefing from Vinay Gupta, part 2 of 2. Its connections are at the top of this file; the map is https://guptaoption.com/llms.txt. Read next: next on the same works, [327](https://guptaoption.com/texts/327.md) Papa Bill's Stew-Stick Jam - Marmaduke Dando - Second Song (2012); the most closely related, [137](https://guptaoption.com/texts/137.md) STAR-TIDES (2007); his whole career in one file, https://guptaoption.com/story.md.