# Undergraduate Lecture Series 2024: Vinay Gupta & Bryan Hellard (Hexayurt Refugee Shelter) (part 1 of 2)

> One source from the archive of Vinay Gupta's work at guptaoption.com, as plain text for AI agents: [727], 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, 2024-04-18 (YouTube upload date), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3DeO2L8fBe8. Text: automatic captions, partly corrected
- On the plan's timeline (by date, not by subject): after the great powers step (Multipolar Realpolitik, 2024), the latest step.
- How it fits the plan (the research build's reading): Shows the Hexacloak beside the hexayurt as the body-level layer of relocation kit.
- Career works it belongs to:
  - Hexacloak (2023): A hooded cloak from standard 60-inch cloth with no manufacturing step: drape, tie, twist a double loop....
  - Hexayurt Refugee Shelter (MICA, Baltimore) (2024): A lecture and a roundtable with Bryan Hellard at the Maryland Institute College of Art: cities instead of...
  - 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)
  - Enabling humanitarian innovation (TEDxEWB) (2010): Talk for Engineers Without Borders: poverty is a permanent disaster that kills about 20 million a year,... (suggested by machine)
  - One Network, One World: Designing for a 7+ Billion Person World (2013): Talk at the OHM2013 hacker camp: housing everyone at one planet's worth of consumption, and why... (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:
  - CheapID to Mattereum: One identity pattern, from a person's ID card in 2006 to warranties on physical goods in 2017.
  - 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.
  - standard SKUs: A survival kit built only from standard, mass-produced parts.
  - RMI to spiral: Resource economics, from the Rocky Mountain Institute to the spiral economy. (through a work suggested by machine)
- Ideas whose earliest source in this archive is this one: Hexacloak
- Topics: disaster / refugee / food (28%); Burning Man shelter building (28%); Property, NFTs & real-estate transactions (12%)
- Distinctive terms here, against the whole archive: refugee camp (8 here; 36 sources in all, earliest dated 2006); legal status (4 here; 14 sources in all, earliest dated 2012); H13 (3 here; 10 sources in all, earliest dated 2002, 1 undated); climate refugees (5 here; 28 sources in all, earliest dated 2010); refugee camps (6 here; 37 sources in all, earliest dated 2007, 1 undated); refugees (10 here; 84 sources in all, earliest dated 2002, 3 undated); Burning Man (7 here; 90 sources in all, earliest dated 2002, 1 undated); Hurricane Katrina (1 here; 4 sources in all, earliest dated 2010); social stability (1 here; 4 sources in all, earliest dated 2020); H18 (1 here; 4 sources in all, earliest dated 2006, 1 undated)
- Importance: core-text score 0.59 (1.00 is the top), number 48 of the 729 sources it scored, the research build's measure of substance, importance and innovation
- Related sources:
  - [724] [Roundtable Discussion with Vinay Gupta and Bryan... (2024)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/724.md): same career work: Hexayurt Refugee Shelter (MICA, Baltimore)
  - [36] [The Hexayurt Project: Free Hardware housing for the world (2002)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/36.md): same career work: Hexacloak
- On the same works, just before: [572] [How To Address Climate Change: Diplomacy, Politics,... (2022)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/572.md); [37] [http://hexayurt.com/coat (2023)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/37.md); [749] [Vinay Gupta: AI's Impact on Jobs and Society (2023)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/749.md)
- On the same works, just after: [724] [Roundtable Discussion with Vinay Gupta and Bryan... (2024)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/724.md); [736] [Mattereum (2024)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/736.md); [243] [Multipolar Realpolitik (Omnibus draft) (2024)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/243.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: Undergraduate Lecture Series 2024: Vinay Gupta & Bryan Hellard (Hexayurt Refugee Shelter), video, 2024-04-18, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3DeO2L8fBe8; in Vinay Gupta's archive at guptaoption.com, source [727], https://guptaoption.com/texts/727.md.

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

## Passages, part 1 of 2
[0:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3DeO2L8fBe8&t=0s) thing okay so uh welcome very much to uh the presentation we're going to do about hexayurts uh large scale climate refugees and Refugee management um but also the uh kind of long-term World piece by 2100 story which I think is an interesting Little Ray of Hope in a currently extremely complicated world uh so let's talk a little bit about external pressure right um the world has a lot of pressure things are pressured so you go back roughly 120 years 1900 turn of the century there's about three billion people and we've just about tripled our numbers in about 120 years but in that time period we've also gigantically increased our resource consumption per person right huge amounts of cheap energy from oil pouring into the global system uh and the result of that is an extremely pressured world right the actual resource consumption of the human race has gone through the roof so the result of that intense pressure is breakdown at the edges where you can't get quite enough stuff into the hands of the people that need it to be able to create something that actually works right you know and you can see that pressure inside of our own Society the rents are extremely high people cannot find meaningful work you've got a lot of homeless people you've got medical bankruptcy you know over and over and over again there are symptoms that the system as a whole is under stress and nobody really knows what to do about it the far rightwing political spring that you see is one of the human re uh responses to Resource scarcity people freak out about resource scarcity they start turning on their neighbors so all of these things are parts of a kind of pervasive Global lockin where we are trapped in a system that is Contin ratting up the pressure and we don't seem to have exit ramps and then at the crescendo of that pressure you get Wars right resource conflict Mass starvation lack of work you know poverty right-wing swing all the rest of this kind of stuff they are well understood sociological and political phenomena that drive this kind of stuff so what I want to talk about about is Refugee management and then what does it look like to figure out a way of reducing the global pressure to the point where we might be able to get a general speaking

[2:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3DeO2L8fBe8&t=150s) stable World Peace okay so um let's start with the basic top tier geography four population quadrants Rich poor urban and rural so we are rich Urban right most of the population of America in the kind of agricultural states are what we would call Rich rural poor rural here you're thinking places like India Africa South America generally speaking people that grow 70 or 80% of their own food you know down to the extremes of poverty dollar day Community this kind of stuff and then the kind of um poor Urban is the great Mega City slums and you can start to think of these is being four very distinct Lifestyles house in the city house in the country Shack in the city Shack in the country Shack in the country you grow most your own Food Shack in the city you have some crappy job if you're lucky so climate change affects these people in different ways right now the people that are getting hit hardest in the states are the rural Rich right they're just getting hammered because their fantastic show houses are catching fire and becoming you know live on CNN then you know this Arabic curse where your house be live on CNN that right so this is the reality of climate change as it hits the urban uh the rural rich in America right that that's it that's climate change boom right there right um Urban poor flooded cities you've all seen that video Bangladesh these kind of places New Orleans they're not as rural you know they're not as Urban poor as the swan Bowers are but that was not a wealthy city um Urban Rich Miami you sort of think how long is it before Miami is going to hit real problems uh and then you've got the rural poor who just get pushed off their land because it gets flooded and it gets poisoned with salt or it's just too mudy to farm or the you get the Dust Bowl phenomena that again of course we've seen in America right and this is just you know what is that is that is that is that South America is that Africa is that the Mississippi Delta somewhere all the same doesn't make any difference this take your pick it all looks the same right ground is the same famine is the same farmers are pretty D somewh here we are right so there's no place that you can be where climate change doesn't potentially hit you in one of these ways right it's just there is no

[5:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3DeO2L8fBe8&t=300s) place you can go that is so far out of this mess that you're not going to be affected by it and that is pretty much the universal image of the refugees it's this or it's this in Boots and you know wraith ethnicity previous lifestyle you know the folks crossing the bridge Hurricane Katrina Not So Different we all know this image right and that that's a phase of life right you have something like a wedding you wear a suit you become a refugee you put as much stuff as you think you're going to need in a duffel bag and you start walking so what do we do with them right where are these people going to go so one possibility is this archetype this structure the refugee camp now the refugee camp has a bunch of weird features because it has weird history the refugee camp is currently stands comes out World War II right Europe is devastated you've got all kinds of people on the run from various armies you've got huge amounts of military surplus equipment lying around and they organize military encampments into which they put European refugees while they sort the cities out and then they move back to their cities right so it was easy to do with the materials and the people and the skills and the expectations available to organize temporary tent cities that were basically the same military comps you'd house the armies in just used for refugees right but nothing about this was intended to be permanent nothing about it was intended to work for families with kids nothing about it was intended to work in extreme weather conditions this was a kind of available technology stop Gap and there was no real rethink between this and you know huge permanent Gatherings right this condition right that that nobody ever really stopped to think hey European model military camps is that what we're going to do with our Refugee populations no real reanalysis point where we stopped the clock and said wait a minute and decided to do something different as we get more Global systemic load from climate refugees we're going to get into a position where we have to stop the clock and say wait a minute because we cannot get any more refugee camp capacity right we just hit the point where the

[7:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3DeO2L8fBe8&t=450s) global humanitarian system starts to break down and at that point we must do something new now the question is what does that something new look like and this is the question I'm going to try and answer so getting out of this Paradigm means building a completely different model of what it is to be a refugee and what happens to refugees so what is needed is a different idea about what happens when people become displaced you become displaced you figure out what you're going to do next you have to go somewhere which allows you to rebuild an economic identity which is to say a job right the two things that you could potentially do in refugee camps would be sensible and meaning for are people could get educations or people could get work and right now both of those are things which refugee camps don't really support right if you were going to be stuck and I mean literally you for 10 years in a condition where you weren't out to work and you had the internet would it be so bad if you came out with that with like a master's degree and maybe spoke through languages you know if we're not going to let these people work at least we should provide intensive educational opportunities and with the internet being what it is and open courseware and all the rest of this kind of stuff how hard could it be right likewise if we're talking about working refugee camps that opens up a ton of options and I will come back to that so what I'm basically suggesting is that we think of the refugee camps as being startup cities rather than camps now this is not a paradigmatic shift inside of the existing Refugee story it's not that we say well now we put refugees and cities and this is the refugee City not the refugee camp blah blah blah we're not talking about that what we're talking about is you're a migrant you're on the move you're not a refugee you're something else that's something else is economic rights or a right to education and we organize those people into cities with the objective of building economic self-sufficiency as fast as possible to free up the human humanitarian capacity for the people with worse problems right so what we're talking about is building a massively powerful rapid conveyor belt out of the refugee condition back into the working condition because if we don't do that the entire global system will clog up with climate refugees we have to get people out of the climate Refugee status immediately in the best way doing that is to never put them into it you have to

[10:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3DeO2L8fBe8&t=600s) leave Bangladesh you have the right to an education or to find work you never lose your economic rights and immediately you have to be reintegrated into the global system as fast as is possible to free up capacity for the other people right and that model where we are trying to keep people out the refugee condition so that they're continuously economically viable you know it's not that there aren't going to be people whose countries are so roid they cannot find work it's that everybody that we can potentially get back into work we do to free up capacity for the worst situations right if we use all of our humanitarian capacity on the mid-range problems we have nothing left for the worst case scenarios so conceptually we're freeing up resources in the mid-range by getting people back to work as quickly as possible so that the low end scenarios we've got some way of actually managing so what's about how we might do this the core is to build permanent places to live right the refugee camp is predicated on being temporary the tent is temporary the tents won't last very long in the outdoors they rot so rather than having a position where we poop and to Temporary accommodation which immediately rots we build buildings that have a real lifespan ahead of them right these guys are called hexayurts the wall piece P are 4x8 sheets the same size as plywood or any other industrial material the roof pieces are half 4x8 sheets you could cut them in the field table saw Handa whatever it happens to be you don't even need power tools in a pinch and these things have been open source for about 20 years they're massively widely used at Desert festivals like burning man there's a commercial version called the ShiftPod manufactured by some folks they also sell it to Aid agencies and these kinds of things so that is an approach you think permanent housing semi-permanent housing if you want to make it permanent permanent you spray them with concrete chicken wire inside and out so I was not any kind of a refugee management person when I invented this thing after I invented it I felt a responsibility for figuring out what we would need to get them used and so there's been this slow process of kind of teaching the design and showing people how the thing works uh that is a video which I'm not going to play now

[12:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3DeO2L8fBe8&t=750s) and people are building on this architectural template and innovating on top of it so this is a picture from burning man where some enterprising folks have got an air conditioning unit and the cold air from a single air conditioner is being piped around all of those little micro buildings apparently it works great right so this is the shift pods right and that's a real picture they're really doing this stuff right six-sided silver pods foldable software materials easier Logistics a bit less insulation perfectly reasonable commercial thing these are the big domes so you can see from the kind of bicycles and stuff around here that's a 14 ft High building 28 ft across roughly $1,000 of materials 450 Square ft you know kind of the size of a reasonable New York one-bedroom that's kind of a joke but you know it's a substantial Builder right and again this is a video I'm not going to show but the a range of these things and Brian will'll talk about that a little bit later so the fact that we've got an American population with arbitrarily large budgets building these things from designs they download off the internet and then living in them for a very expensive vacation in the middle of a hard hard desert is a pretty good indication that this is competitive to RVS it's competitive to tents any other housing solution that is ailable inside of market capitalism for these specific populations it beats out so it's a pretty decent technology you know you regularly meet people who going to Burning Man and you know are you going in an RV or a hexayurt or a 10 ah a hexayurt is considered to be a good option right so we've achieved parity with everything else inside of market capitalism with an open source technology that is Homebrew manufacturer that's kind of a big deal it's a little bit like Linux you know Linux is just about as good as a Mac or a Windows machine for most purposes when Linux hit parity with windows that was kind of a major event right and so we have an open source housing solution which is roughly at parity with aast improvised temporary housing Solutions so what that gets us is the ability to start talking about large scale urbanism but large scale urbanism framed inside of a kind of modular

[15:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3DeO2L8fBe8&t=900s) framework right you have a c container arrive the C container contains within it racks of pre-produced hexayurt panels or even pre-produced hexayurts you drag these things out you set them up there's your housing good for a few years without a concrete cover if you want to go permanent permanent you sort out a foundation you spray the damn thing with concrete what else do you need stoves water filters Transportation lighting toilet and all of this stuff exists in high quality reasonably permanent structures right that still will last a good long time the versions which you don't have fan assist last essentially forever bicycles 20 years with the regular maintenance easily maybe longer LED lights you pull the battery out every 3 years you put in a new AA battery you get some more light right suab toilets that things will basically run forever so what kind of suab Sulabh suab sulab Indian toilet designs and there's thing called the world toilet organization the other WTO which is like a trade Association for all the people that build unconventional toilet Technologies amazing um so all these things together right provide a service architecture and exactly what set of services you need and which place you need to provide those services this is kind of an open question right so if you're in a really hot place you might need mosquito Nets you might need antimalarial protection you know regular patrols that basically you know make sure that you've got no standing water and all the rest of this kind of stuff there's a fantastic mosquito eradication technique where everybody puts out jars of water around all of the corners of their buildings and every couple of days you throw the water out and put fresh water out the mosquitoes lay their eggs in the water and then you throw the eggs on the ground and they die if everybody does this consistently you wind up with essentially zero mosquitoes it's really effective right and those kinds of approaches if everybody does it can you get malaria eradication even in malarial areas nobody's entirely sure but it's worth a try right so this notion of a set as a service architecture if you can cover all the basic needs that people have from a modular containerized building approach what you get out of that is the potential of a very very dramatic shift in our ability to rehouse people if the climate pushes them out of their existing ecological uh and

[17:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3DeO2L8fBe8&t=1050s) economic Niche right and this is the kind of foundational technology for doing that it's called simple critical infrastructure maps and it's basically a toolkit for deciding what you're going to do if you try and get a population to survive in some environment they're not currently in so six ways that people can die a set of Technologies are assembled into a package that allows you to control those risks now what technologies you need depends on what place you're in what kind of population you're supporting so this is not a kind of one- siiz fits-all answer it's a methodology for figuring out how to take care of people right that methodology you know you sit down and you draw out the map okay how much too hot is it how much too cold is it you put together all the pieces of these stories all the pieces of these puzzles and that is what gives you the ability to figure F out for a given population what are the support tools and support technologies that you need to support that population right and there are additional layers on this right lets you map the municipal infrastructure the regional infrastructure you could put together the whole story for a specific place what services you get from which levels if the water is coming from Municipal Wells but being purified at the household level you could draw out that diagram right where your medical support okay Regional Hospital there are a set of services which originate at the nation state level rule of law is essentially a service policing a service large scale Public Health Services and these things come both from the bottom up in forms of the solar panels on your roof but also from the top down in terms of the pro Services provided by your nation state um and these kinds of models you have individuals you have groups you have organizations you have the state there's an interl me methodology for mapping out these systems called simple critical infrastructure Maps right and it just builds a map of the service ecology which keeps people alive you could draw it out for Baltimore but you could also draw out for madisha you could draw out for a refugee camp in South San this is how much too hot it is this is how much too cold it is these are the contaminants in the local water these are the problems with water accessibility and here's all piece by piece by piece how do people

[20:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3DeO2L8fBe8&t=1200s) communicate okay they've got cell phones they've got short Rave radio and it all comes together into basically a spreadsheet which is called the integrated needs analysis Matrix and you basically just work your way through and methodically fill this thing in when you want to do infrastructure design for large scale populations or you could take it for camping trip uh all of this stuff is online at resilience maps.org resilien maps.org uh I also want to point out that if you're interested in failed States there's a whole analysis on what causes States to become failed which lives down here so what I want to kind of point out here is that we do have this ability to build out very large scale containerized cities right relatively cost efficient configurable for the environment that people going into and these pieces together they form a kind of integrated story about how it might be possible to start approaching the question of hundreds of millions of climate refugees without that being an incredible humanitarian disaster you know people are in the process where they're going to become displaced they get a new kind of identity and a new kind of legal status it gives them entitlements to work it gives them entitlements to education of certain kinds you have cities or uh you know potentially almost suburbs could be density could be low density where certain sets of essential services are present and these things scale linearly so the factories producing the life support material Just Produce at a consistent constant rate and you gradually absorb these populations back into the economy when you get a really bad crisis much larger and much more unexpected than usual you then reserve the global humanitarian capacity for dealing with those crises so rather than treating everything as a massive crisis a lot of this is basically reframed as being a new category with a different set of legal status and a different set of entitlements and also we build a new kind of urbanism and a new kind of economic model to soak these populations back up into productivity because I don't think the globe has the willingness to expand the humanitarian system to handle you know 5 or 10% of the global population becoming customers of the humanitarian system it's just not built to operate at that size you know it's kind of like the hospitals when they become overwhelmed you you know at mass

[22:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3DeO2L8fBe8&t=1350s) casualty events you can handle that once in a while but if that's your daily load you need a whole new way of doing things it's exactly that kind of model um so um Brian I'm going to turn it over to you uh so let me introduce Brian G to come up so uh I started the Hexayurt Project working on the shelter side of this in 2002 2003 I built the first prototype uh I am not particularly good at building things you know I'm a software engineer by trade and so the hexayurt has always been simple to build because I'm just not that good at building stuff um Brian on the other hand is really good at building stuff and really good at computer modeling and works with robots and card and all the rest of this kind of stuff so you know what we have is kind of an open-source project and what Brian has been doing is basically been sorting out a lot of the mess which comes when you have somebody who's not an architect or not a design engineer attempting to maintain this kind of project would you like to take over sir I'll take it fantastic where's other little microphone oh yeah let me give you that here you go uh and there's just adjust the Dy thing there we are so you start it here all right okay so with the idea of all these projects and all these modular systems and everything let's scroll up to the top um all of it is built around being being Open Source Hardware cuz as much as we can take Burning Man ideas and make people pay for things it's nice to do that on the Prototype stage of you say hey here's a thing figure it out we need some money to prototype it but once it gets going it's just an idea that you want as many people to have um so a comment V made before was you want these hexayurts and these Technologies and things have the same legal status as knots it's like just you take some rope put it together in a certain way and you get a cool result out of it so as part of that there's been this website that V I'm sure has more history it's linked to a bunch of other people called appropedia which is a storage or information repository of appropriate Technologies so appropriate in the sense of they're sustainable they're recyclable they're reusable they're simple but as complex as they need to be like they're exactly what they need to fulfill no more no less so this whole website is a collection of them and the part that I've been working

[25:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3DeO2L8fBe8&t=1500s) on recently has been cleaning up the whole hexayurt project side so on this main page there goes through some history some background stuff different ways to put it together different field applications that they've been used in just a collection of links throughout the past two decades or something of people contributing and things like that uh so a lot of it was just cleaning simplifying putting everything back together but something I was working on was I'm going to go with the master list first so all the people throughout the years who've contributed to this there's a whole bunch of different size Ys let's actually grab a couple little ones just for fun so these are some of the existing ones someone had built a page of oh please be a picture yep there's one so a little tiny tent sized one we a little tiny hex ear we put together and uh here's some basic methodology information how to do it anyway lots of good information that's stored but it was a little bit all over the place and there was a little bit of gaps in the design um wait I have one little image down here that I really like to see it but when you look at different yts on different scales there's a lot of design similarities so these H numbers H h18 h15 that's just how many sheets of material you need to make it so the classic over there is the h12 the little hexayurt but you can easily make it bigger by just putting two boards on side and the whole thing lifts up and they have a taller place to uh live in or you cut them in half and you get a little half-size one but then that's the exact same if instead of using 4x8 sheets you use 2x4 sheets cut everything in quarters and you get your little mini hexayurt or you have a little tent that's big enough for one person or you flip the boards up on their side and it's the same size tent is just the geometry of everything scales so noticing a lot of design patterns and things between these different models that's what then led to this master list which I'm working on building and filling out and making models of uh one clever one h13 h13 is a nice one uh it was a big evolution of taking this front pen of the hexayurt and just by adding one

[27:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3DeO2L8fBe8&t=1650s) extra piece of material it pops up the whole front side and then it gives a lot more Standing Room makes it a lot more comfortable to use and then which also builds from the h13 to an h14 of you do that on both sides and then if you look at the top of that tent it actually looks very similar oh where's the Little House Model H it's just like this little guy but bigger instead of a four please have a picture of this one oh same picture you've sold before yeah some of these link to the same place because they're not entirely built out uh but yeah anyway like it's the similar idea of you pop it up and you get like a similar tent model tent up on walls and then that also led to these designs are all hex based they're all sixes but you can take let's skip up to the top cuz here's another graph uh if you put four of them together you get square models or you get pentagonal or triangle and this is infinite you could just keep cutting your triangle smaller and smaller but it quickly becomes impractical so I figured let's let's cap it at 12 um and then that leads to some other tent shapes that you can build or Dome shapes some of these big flat domes don't make any sense or you can make some other domes so I was exploring a lot of different designs and options could you mention snow yes okay so yes okay good Segway um so with all these designs I was trying to quantify I here's a whole chart I don't really want to explain the whole thing but I was making charts of comparing different um use cases for each one so things of how simple are they could how simple are they to construct based on how many sheets how many Cuts how many joints uh how complex is the geometry and then all of that in theory coalesces into a number of these are the most efficient designs but based on snow they're more or less efficient in different places so based on some of the models we can look at later in the back uh one of the big ones I don't know if this is I don't really have a quad Dome let's do a little picture of quad Dome so this Dome structure is very good for volume efficiency uh based on how many sheets you have you have a big big internal surface area which works really well for hotter drier areas so you want to have

[30:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3DeO2L8fBe8&t=1800s) more air flow inside and keep your cooling easier uh but then if you have a snowy area or rainy area where's the octagonal that's oct octagon yep so if you pick something with a pointier roof cone then that works a lot better with snow buildup or rain or you want to have you want to have more runoff in uh and then you would also want less volume like the opposite of a big quad Dome uh say if you're in a really cold area cuz then you got to think of insulation and heating and how much effort do you want to put into heating up your internal volumes so using all these different design considerations you can help piece together which ones are best applicable for each place around the world and then this is just a lot of work again it's a open source Wikipedia type page so everyone can and is encouraged to contribute find some pictures find some something post up what you can um so that's all the hexayurt side but if we go down uh there's a whole bunch of analysis of different materials that you can use so since they're all based on the standard 4x8 sheet that you can buy at any hardware store or you can even extrapolate that to a 2x1 rectangle of any size could be 3 ft x 6 ft or chop them into smaller pieces to 2T by 4T but you can make them out of plywood you can make them out of insulation foam you can make them out of special Plastics so just whatever's available you can use to make and then depending how you attach them together some of the lighter materials work really well with a tape uh it's like a 3in or 6 in wide tape which has some nice filaments in it it's usually used for wrapping metal bundles when transporting huge bundles of metal up and down back of trucks so that has quite longlasting properties uh for putting them together folding them unfolding them there's been burning man structures that have lasted what 5 10 years people just 10 easy use them over and over again um if you use a nice uh filament tape like this for the joints and then cover it with a aluminium tape to get the extra reflectivity that helps protect it a lot from the Sun so these don't degrade and fall apart uh so lots of material use uh potential for different places to put them or there's some plastic propylene

[32:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3DeO2L8fBe8&t=1950s) honeycomb propylene honeycomb poly polypropolene which is a nice thick plastic material which has better insulation and is more longer lasting you can hose it down and it'll be easier to clean things like that so that could be used for more permanent Solutions or if you want to go for Speed say in an emergency one uh you can do like honeycomb cardboard very similar to Ikea desks so you get your honeycomb in the middle and you slap some plastic little thin layer top and bottom or even thin like pop can aluminium uh so that could be very quickly built out in an emergency um infrastructure package so infrastructure package is all the other things that you need so if you're thinking of the basic six things that kill you you need water you need food hot and cold you're kind of covered by your structure injury and illness you can get your basic medical at home but illness is heavily based in the food and water that you're drinking so there are also lots of appropriate Technologies on this website and on other websites the world toilet organization other places there are a lot of groups out there working on different piece of this puzzle so a big part of it is just trying to pull a lot of these floating pieces together in a more unified place for people who need it being able to get access to this information so got some infrastructure working on cleaning it up modifications to adjust these designs so the point is there's a lot of customizability information's out there we want to collect more information everyone who can can contribute to this project everything's open source there's no patents or legal status or anyone can build it anyone can contribute there's been some things about where they've gone like in the military military oh let's check the military page uh V I believe this is your article um oh yeah 2007 yeah back in the again back in the day okay yeah some of your experience of what the beginning of this presentation was about yeah two5 yeah yeah uh the 15 main questions that's like Material Science um not structure what's the base Foundation Foundation layers that was one of them lowcost materials more lowcost materials uh different pegs

[35:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3DeO2L8fBe8&t=2100s) for sticking it to the ground floors and structures better tapes or connecting components uh standard structure on thermal models this just makes it a lot easier to do analysis and simulations and figuring out if you put it in a hot environment what kind of air conditioning do you need uh stocks and flows I believe is just materials moving around a camp yeah so this this is the um this gets into the computational modeling side of it right yeah okay skip that part go into it this this stuff is old old old right so this is kind of almost 15 years old material because Wiki is just accumulate data so the computational modeling aspect of it is the idea that if you're going to do this stuff at enormous scale um what you want is to be able to simulate stuff before you do it right you know what's the capacity of this Factory oh well this what about that factory here what about this what's the logistical capacity so the sort of notion was that you could build out large scale digital simulations of caps so that you could figure out whether or not it was going to work or not and you could figure out carrying capacity um these days I actually run a company which is specialized in doing um legally binding digital modeling of physical assets and you know all of that stuff we're currently working on various kind of commercial offerings but in the long run the expectation is to take that technology and use to actually provide legal Frameworks for people who are doing this kind of refugee camp technology so that you can make a set of Legally binding guarantees about for example the wind load a shelter will take uh and then when you put those shelters into the field if they underperform there's a legal framework for who is legally attached to that situation who has to pay compensation damages and so on water filters compatability between components will that charge our work with that solar panel and the entire idea is to build out digital models of all these things tied to Aid transparency Financial tracking uh liability Arrangements you know logistical supply chain all the rest of that stuff in an integrated digital framework which allows you to model not only the equipment in the camps but also when we start talking about economies if you've got those models for most of the stuff which is in the camp which is being used to generate income and generate Revenue it also allows for the potential of a very high efficiency local digital economy model so you say hey I need a 10 mm wrench and it tells

[37:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3DeO2L8fBe8&t=2250s) you exactly where you can get one and how right do you want to wrap up is there anything else we should talk about it would be a big topic switch so that's enough on this topic okay all right cool fabulous I need that for you thank you thank you so and this you know in terms of understanding how open source projects work you know I was kind of maintaining this thing on my with various folks that would come in and help me get it set up then we had a long kind of disorganized period of lots of different volunteers just kind of piling material up slowly Bri came in and began to systematize and build proper digital models and so everybody does a little different parts of this but he's definitely carrying you know the majority of the load of taking all the stuff which is built up over 15 years of people building these things at Burning Man and then pulling all that together into the over archering structure which is necess to organize the next phase of the project going forward um and you know as I get older and more burdened with the respons abilities having somebody come in just way right I'm going to take care of all of this it's under control it's amazing it's fantastic okay so um I think I've you know made a case here right open- Source collaboration large scale development of resources prototyping at Burning Man modeling work for how these pieces could fit together commercialization of some of the core technologies that are necessary to actually build this stuff out for reals right my company Mattereum you know explicitly built it to develop a long range capability to do a transparency stuff properly I knew that we weren't going to get funding to pay for that work out of the aid industry so I built that as dual use stuff you want to buy and sell bars of gold or single family Apartments you want to be able to sell those things based on digital models the whole thing ties together to Legal Arrangements it ties to you know smart contracts all of that sort of stuff and building a commercial capability and the intention is to wheel it back around to the aid World once there's enough scale and enough volume that it could be done commercially and why do it commercially because there's no other way to develop that kind of software that kind of technology so the final thing that I want to talk about is an agenda that I call World Peace by 2100 right so world peace is a very unfashionable concept right it's really unfashionable back in the days of the Cold War and the nuclear threat and all the rest of that stuff you know the peace symbol and

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Continues in https://guptaoption.com/texts/727-2.md (part 2 of 2).
End of [727] Undergraduate Lecture Series 2024: Vinay Gupta & Bryan Hellard (Hexayurt Refugee Shelter), part 1 of 2. Its connections are at the top of this file; the map is https://guptaoption.com/llms.txt.