The Survival Machine Farm 214
pacopico writes "There's a 30-acre plot of land in Maysville, MO where about two dozen people have gathered to build a Civilization Starter Kit. As Businessweek reports, they're working on open-source versions of bulldozers, bread ovens, saws and other tools right on up to robots and chip fabs. The project has been dubbed the Factor e Farm, and it's run by a former nuclear physicist and a bunch of volunteers. The end goal is to have people modify the tool designs until they're good enough to compete with commercial equipment."
Open Source Bulldozer? (Score:4, Insightful)
An Open Source Bulldozer?
I think these Open Source evangelists are going a bit off their rocker.
Re:Ah... Yeah... (Score:5, Insightful)
Perhaps not, but the idea of an archive from which the survivors of a disaster could start to rebuild is intriguing. I'd tend to focus more in information than objects, mostly because I believe it would be easier to ensure that the information survives in a usable state, but objects do have the advantage of allowing you to test your specifications.
Misguided... (Score:5, Insightful)
If you are serious at building civilization survival kit, obsess less with open source (in the event of apocalypse there won't be anyone enforcing patents), but with a designing robust, reliable and highly redundant system to meet basic needs.
Re:Open Source Bulldozer? (Score:5, Insightful)
There are probably more people in the world who can benefit from a robust, easy to build, easy to repair, fully documented bulldozer than there are people who can benefit from open source software. Now, whether they have actually produced a design that is any of those things is another question that I'm not equipped to try to answer.
Re:Ah... Yeah... (Score:4, Insightful)
Perhaps not, but the idea of an archive from which the survivors of a disaster could start to rebuild is intriguing. I'd tend to focus more in information than objects, mostly because I believe it would be easier to ensure that the information survives in a usable state, but objects do have the advantage of allowing you to test your specifications.
Neither are actually really of much use. There's too much interconnected technology these days. Behind any one little thing there's a chain of a hundred other technologies (or entire industries) supporting it. And underlying almost all of it is "available energy". There are very few viable energy sources a group of "survivors" could tap if they truly had to bootstrap a technical society again. The fuel sources that powered industrialization (coal, whale oil, eventually petroleum) are all largely non-recoverable anymore without infrastructure built up over time using those same energy sources.
A bulldozer won't help you do much -- you need steel to make more. That takes electricity or coal. To get electricity, you need (in its simplest form, something like hydro) bulldozers. To get coal, you need them, too. And to build them you need steel -- and fuel to power them. To get that fuel, you need drilling equipment. See where this goes?
If you really wanted to help "survivors" you need to enormously reduce the industrial and energy requirements of manufacturing your manufacturing equipment. The industrial revolution was very likely a one-time event in history, at this point.
Re:Ah... Yeah... (Score:5, Insightful)
You can't quite reverse engineer machinery with your bare hands. Sure, you can take the thing apart (for the most part) and examine how the parts are shaped and how they fit together. But the metallurgy alone is a whooole other ball game.
Here's an example: my espresso machine. Yes, I know, it's not a farm combine, but work with me for a second. It's stainless steel, but if you look carefully at it, you'll see that the body of the machine is a different color metal than the tray at the bottom. And there's a reason for this: the steel of those two sections, while both considered "stainless steel," are different alloys. Why is this? Well, I happen to know that it's for reasons of ductility with regard to the body of the machine, and of stiffness for the tray. But what I don't know is the exact composition of those alloys. I also don't know how to make the dies that produced either component, how to smelt the raw metals that went into the alloys, and so on...
Now, that was just the outside body of a relatively simple device with relatively minimal demands with regards to physical strain or usage. Just a household espresso machine. Take that a step further, onto a device that has waaaaay more moving parts, exerts far more force, and must also be weatherproof. Something that will be exposed to grit, dust, moisture, mud, snow, and rain. Something with hydraulics (good luck reverse-engineering the fluid, by the way) and an internal combustion engine, and an electrical system. Try reverse engineering the metal of the cogs and bearings, the plastic/neoprene of the seals, the wires, the chips inside the microprocessors. And then try to imagine how to build them all.
I'd hang out with the Amish, and cast my lot with them...
Re:Ah... Yeah... (Score:5, Insightful)
That may be so, but his focus is all off. I mean, he's working on a plasma cutter, but he hasn't got centralized waste treatment down. His list of "essential tools for a modern society" includes a 3-D scanner. While it may be very useful for quickly developing models of already-existing artifacts that you need to do a clean-lab reproduction of, it's a long-tail need. Arguably, someone with a set of calipers and a sketchpad should be able to produce a workable set of engineering drawings sufficient to build most things that you could accurately scan with a hand-made 3D scanner. It's folly, like much of what they're pursuing.
Having said all this, I laud the core idea of what they say they'd like to achieve. However, more analysis needs to be put into their plan; more requirements gathering and architecture is needed. For instance, they have their vaunted "power cube". If you read the documentation on their site, they're all excited that future power cubes could have electric motors at their core instead of ICEs, and other power cubes have hydraulic pumps in them. What they fail to realize is that they have two different types of object here: one that generates mechanical energy from some sort of fuel (lumping electricity in with "fuel", which I realize is a stretch here on Slashdot; please keep reading), the other that translates that mechanical energy into a different format. If they had fuel-to-energy cubes (gas or diesel or methane or whatever converted to rotating mechanical), then energy-to-energy cubes (rotating mechanical to one of linear mechanical, hydraulic, or electric), and finally a rotating mechanical-to-electric generator, these objects could be combined in a variety of assemblies to produce what they need.
And it's really not clear to me what they consider "modern society" that they're trying to reproduce. To me, any sort of development since about the Industrial Revolution has been essentially a refinement of capability, including machine-based calculation (thank you Mr. Babbage). Sure, if you want to build computers using silicon instead of tubes, that's much better. But our society and level of comfort could be no worse, and arguably better, if technology never got significantly better than we had a hundred years ago. How many of the trappings of modern society do we really need, and how many just make us more comfortable? How many things did we have a hundred years ago that we could re-implement with the benefit of hindsight and have a much better life than we have today?