They've been mentioned before. They've been at this since at least 2012, and they've only built a few prototype machines. Productivity seems low.
The whole set of machines looks like something China's ministry of agriculture would have come up with around 1980 or so. There are some standard items widely used in rural China and India, manufactured by many manufacturers. Here's a small Diesel engine.[1] This thing is brutally simple - one cylinder, non-recirculating water cooled (you have to add water when you add fuel), hand crank start, no emission controls. Costs about US$300. There's someone who has a YouTube channel of fixing discarded engines of this type. There seem to be a lot of them lying around, all very similar but from different manufacturers. It's the AK-47 of Diesel engines - it's crude, it Just Works, and it can be fixed. It's mass-produced, because making metal parts in quantity is very efficient, while one-offs are too labor intensive.
Here's a basic tractor, the Wuzheng TS, costing around $6,000. "Mature technology", the maker says. There are hundreds of thousands of those things in the Third World.
That's how this gets done in the real world. Mass produced machines of similar design that's proved itself. That's how the US did it, back when the Fordson tractor [3] was popular. Ford produced low-end tractors until 1964.
You can still buy low-end farm equipment cheaply. It's not cost effective for a commercial farm, but it's still available. Sometimes it's all you need.
Exactly. Why try to make something open source community stuff when we can just order cheap stuff from China. China is wonderful. China has solved the problem for us. We can rely on China.
Those same Diesel engines are available from India and several other countries.
Again, it's like the AK-47. Somebody really good got the design right, and now others can just replicate it.
Diesel engine design is non-trivial. It takes a lot of compression to get the heat necessary for ignition. It takes strong structures to handle that pressure. The fuel injector has to be able to overcome the pressure of compression and spray fuel into the cylinder. You need to get more energy out than you spend on compression and injection.
The thermodynamics are complicated. That all gets built into the dimensions of the metal parts, and it all looks simple, but it's not. Those little engines doesn't even need a glow plug to get started. Or even much cranking. They just work. Cheaply.
> Exactly. Why try to make something open source community stuff when we can just order cheap stuff from China.
It's rare to see common sense on Hacker News.
1.4 billion people who get things done verse fat nerds in basements talking stuff and can't even get their theory right. Open sourcing an X they have never actually used.
What is of interest is why China and not Africa or India or Brazil (BRICS+) so much, this is where the discussion is at.
Perhaps, could the fat nerds work with China and do things? This is controversial, NEETs can't even do advanced high school math anymore. They have given up.
Likewise I've seen compact farm equipment, in the same size/weight category as ride-on mowers and handheld cultivators, a bit like the "microcombine" they are advertising - which they don't have a real life link of. See e.g. [0]
I wonder what the purpose of this website is. I suppose if someone wants to start a community or a larger homestead they could use a starter pack, a complete set of all or part of this equipment in a handy storage solution, like a standard container. Wild guess, but I bet you can get a homestead starter kit like that (minus house / building materials) for $100K. (and you probably wouldn't need an aluminium extruder)
Seems like a neat thought experiment taken to (some stage of) implementation. Like OLPC. Solving problems we think people might have, while missing the more important issues (whatever they may be; I certainly don’t know myself). Idea is nice but feels “too cute”.
I like that it focuses on repairability. Seems like these might be fun to experiment with. Or as a kit for a “homestead” in remote Alaskan wilderness, where you’d like to be able to repair yourself without having to deal with long travel time and expensive shipping.
The OP seems like the academic approach to what project kamp is learning by doing: They're attempting to build a community that's eventually completely self sufficient on a fairly limited land space, and documenting the whole process.
I like Project Kamp and have been following them for years. However, I feel they’re moving quite slowly and often making mistakes on problems that have already been solved. For example, it took them a while to figure out their composting toilet, and even now it’s not a great solution.
They tend to have what are essentially interns do a bit of “research” and then piece together a solution. That said, I do applaud their efforts. It’s very entertaining to watch, and they seem to be hiring people lately who are more knowledgeable in their fields.
So, I very much appreciate this open-source-ecology “academic approach.”
I’ve been following Open Source Ecology for years and they too are moving quite slowly. One part of the website points to a 2014 presentation. I’ve seen very little progress in the last ten years. Sad, because it’s a great idea.
I wonder if they try to reinvent the wheel on purpose (the "first principles" thing people on HN often mention). Using off-the-shelf products can feel like cheating if your objective is to protest society / capitalism.
Project Kamp would definitely benefit from opening up a new workshop on site with the sole purpose of building some of the Open Source Ecology tooling .. it'd help them immensely with tractor scams and .. especially of course .. defeating the neverending onslaught of Spikey Booshes ..
Efficiency I get, self sufficiency I don't get. Self sufficiency is net terrible as impact to the globe. It's obvious that specialization+trade gives us much more efficiency, be it in raw material usage, power usage, you name it, to create whatever product. Even space usage requirements balloon if everyone wants to be self sufficient.
If people want to optimize for self sufficiency they will need to hoard more stuff, they will need to produce and duplicate a lot, use more land and for sure they won't have any good stuff like doctors with a surgery room.
Self sufficiency is usually a goal for those who want to avoid a systems collapse. When everyone is highly specialized and dependent on one another, failure in one part (especially if that part is logistical) cascades throughout the whole. For example, if the town’s petroleum distributor burns down, how long will residents be able to convey food home or products to market? If global shipping failed today, how long would it take for other nations to run out of food and pharmacological needs and silicon? If China destroyed the chip fabs in Taiwan by accident during an invasion, how long does it take the rest of the world to recover? During the pandemic we saw how vulnerable economic systems are to supply chain shocks, so it’s not unreasonable for people in the wake of that experience to seek a world with less exposure to that risk.
I would argue that mutual reliance actually makes the system as a whole more resilient.
If you think you don’t need that petroleum distributor, you won’t put any effort into preventing its destruction. Not my problem, right?
Oops, but I forgot that even though I’m self sufficient in energy (maybe I have solar panels and batteries) it turns out I still need plastic! I guess I did need that distributor after all. Shame I didn’t realize that before it burned down.
> If global shipping failed today, how long would it take for other nations to run out of food and pharmacological needs and silicon?
I don’t think it’s worth worrying about “what happens if the hand of god comes down tomorrow and deletes all ocean vessels and doesn’t touch anything else.” There isn’t a plausible scenario where global shipping—and nothing else—fails. You might as well start making contingency plans for if the sun gets turned into green cheese.
To your point about the pandemic: the experiment we did was “what happens when you turn off labor in all sectors at once?” We would have had exactly the same result even if every country were self sufficient.
It turns out that effectively no human has been self sufficient for millennia. American settlers on the Great Plains needed iron nails and barbed wire from back east. Native Americans traded furs for guns with Europeans because it was mutually beneficial. All over the world people lived in groups because specialization and trading (even if they didn’t call it that) enabled a higher quality of living than gathering berries all alone.
"and for sure they won't have any good stuff like doctors with a surgery room."
Depends how big the project/village is.
Also the basic idea is to be as self sufficient as possible. Not as a dogma.
And the benefit once it runs is, you don't have to go make war around the globe, because your economy is threatened. You can just stay at home minding your own buisness.
I do enjoy the freedom of movement in the EU, but don't enjoy the regulation of cucumbers.
(At least they relaxed those by now, but they still move the parliament every month, because they cannot agree on one place, I rather mind my own buisness than dealing with that)
Isolationism doesn’t work as a policy, that is proven by history. Or if it works it needs some radically different ideas. The aspect about ignoring defense is also naive, what happens when your neighbours that do have a military decide your land and self sufficiency are something they want? The best thing to prevent that, and the first step, is to have established trade with them, which in your plan you don't want or need.
Also you will breed a population of "nationalists" (at whatever size this is applied to) after a few generations if nobody is involved in trade.
"Isolationism doesn’t work as a policy, that is proven by history."
Of course it does. Many remote mountain villages preserved their culture this way.
"Also you will breed a population of "nationalists" "
I think you have never been to such a self sustainable project?
They are usually living a culture of internationalists and there are frequent guests from all around the world.
What you means are cults. They also exist, true. But those operating in the open are mostly .. open.
Also the basic idea is to establish a network of trading and sharing in general. Specialisation is useful after all.
But for the basic needs, I like the idea to be independent here.
And yes, ideally also have a competent doctor you can just wake up from next door in the middle of the night in a case of emergency and not hope a ambulance is avaiable in time.
> I think you have never been to such a self sustainable project?
They are usually living a culture of internationalists and there are frequent guests from all around the world.
You're taking about who thinks it's cool to try to do this kind of thing. The post your replying to is trying to predict how things might evolve over a (very) long time in case of actual success.
It seems we are not talking about the same thing. You seem to be talking about strict isolationists. Those are usually of the cult type and no doubt they will all create their version of nationalism likely within the 1. Generation.
But all the other self sustainable projects that I know, are far from the idea of wanting to shut themself of the world.
The main idea is just to not be so dependent on the crazyness of this world. But still be connected to the world. Trade, travel, exchange, ..
How many of those projects have been going for more than 3 generations? Why do you think all the last times it was attempted it turns to that? Most of the undisturbed tribes kill intruders on sight. Most countries that ever turned to isolationism have their population suffer vs their neighbours when enough time passes. I said nothing about the intentions of who starts these communities, that barely matters, what matters is the system they put in place after a few generations. If the system is flawed good intentions go nowhere because after a few generations you don't have a group of idealists anymore, you have random people operating in an isolationist system and they'll act according to their incentives.
We should maximize cooperation between communities, not restrict it. It's the best way to avoid war long term.
I think any serious countries of the future will spend substantial resources planting self-sufficiency caches every so many kilo acres. Students should be taught the basics of booting and sustaining a self-sufficient pod.
It shouldn’t be about isolationism / anarchy, but about limiting the blast radius for any given disaster.
Finally it also serves as a center for rehab, starting from scratch, and community service. The ultimate social safety net.
For the few that live, I suppose. But this is like an almost-worst-case scenario where the people are some of the few (1%) to survive. Most disasters, even all-out war like in Ukraine or Gaza have relatively few casualties, but they all have needs. The program in Denmark where they start up emergency stores (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45216805) makes a lot more sense in that regard.
People should always have emergency supplies to last up to three days for the fairly common scenario of power outages, supply chain disruptions and extreme weather events. If you live in a disaster prone area, a week's worth of supplies should still be manageable. Anything worse than that and it's probably best to evacuate. Only the rich have the space, time and means to dig in for longer, think people with bomb shelters, storage basements, and a lifestyle of living on preserved foods (because you need to rotate things on a regular basis).
I’m thinking the vast majority of the value comes not from enabling survival but from de-alienation, which I believe is fundamental in reaching a better overall state.
>Self sufficiency is net terrible as impact to the globe. It's obvious that specialization+trade gives us much more efficiency, be it in raw material usage, power usage, you name it, to create whatever product. Even space usage requirements balloon if everyone wants to be self sufficient.
I think you forget that the alternative hides a ton of externalities.
For example those massive agri corporations are vaaaastly more efficient than me or my grandpa working our own gardens.
But we aren't spraying or the like to contribute to insect population collapse.
We're being rather damn space efficient, yet we don't use any fertilisers from gas and mining.
We don't compact the soil or lose topsoil.
and what we do produce is less deficient in micronutrients.
And as someone else already said. It really just means more self-sufficient.
Big agri corps can afford large tractors that till, plant and harvest more efficiently. They can afford to buy remote sensing imagery to optimize planting. In other words, there exist scale effects in agriculture.
You lose those effects if every hundred acres needs to produce all of needs of a human family. Self sufficient is less efficient.
You can bring back some of those effects with co-ops, but now it starts looking like a single large business with many owners again.
Maybe this maxim within our software world might help: "Be loosely coupled, tightly cohesive".
Decoupling (the kind of self-sufficiency you are envisioning) is only a distant goal for interplanetary colonization. Loose coupling is fine as baby steps. As long as within their community they are tightly cohesive, they will do fine.
The intent is sustainable resiliency baked into our systems.
Lots of link rot in their list of stuff. Starting at the top of the list for the 3D printer goes to an Amazon 404. The John Deere twine baler redirects to Deere's home page.
Is this something that has since been abandoned and being shown here for historical purposes? An example of another panacea idea that just lost internet steam?
Comments here are a bit rough. Marcin does plenty of work for OSE and the community is still active but most of it is in-person/offline -- hard for a lot of us to believe, I know, but there is human activity that takes place outside the internet.
I’m from the self-replicating self-reconfigurable systems side.
The problem with this is not about making the machines but the human intervention to make use of them effectively. You really need end-to-end automation to solve this.
If i don’t remember wrongly all this started due to john deere implementing DRM in their equipment. this is a political problem because the issue can be resolved by just buying chinese equivalents and changing patent/ip law.
In Dan Wang’s recent “Breakneck” he makes the case that process knowledge is what really drives technological cultures, not the creation of tools or blueprints. He questions whether blueprints of any specificity, sent back to Roman times, would be enough to build something like an automobile or combine.
Steam power wasn't feasible until the Bessemer process and rolled sheet steel made the creation of pressure vessels a reliable and repeatable process.
An internal combustion engine requires that, plus ceramics and an alloy suited to high temperatures (for the spark plugs) as well as copper or aluminum for wiring.
>Steam power wasn't feasible until the Bessemer process and rolled sheet steel made the creation of pressure vessels a reliable and repeatable process.
Also precision boring to produce tight-fitting cylinders. James Watt spent nearly a decade trying to build a viable steam engine, but only succeeded after John Wilkinson invented a machine to bore cannon barrels in 1774. It turns out that making a hole that is straight, deep and round is fiendishly difficult without specialist equipment and expertise.
Newcomen's steam-engine, the first commercially successful one, was 01712. James Watt's steam engine was 01776. Trevithick's high-pressure engine patent, which is the point at which steam-engines started needing pressure vessels as opposed to vacuum vessels, was 01802. Trevithick's first steam-powered train was 01804. The Bessemer process was 01856, after the end of the steam-engine-driven First Industrial Revolution. But steel was still not in wide use for pressure vessels until I think about 01880, but I'm less sure of that.
Diesel engines are internal combustion engines that do not require spark plugs or wiring.
Ceramics are from about 12000 years ago, and copper is from about 8500 years ago. The hard part about wires is more the insulation than the wire itself.
Did you get your errors from Winchester's book? I usually think of him as more reliable than that.
To be fair, the atmospheric engine was just barely practical for pumping water out of mines. Newcomen sold over a hundred of them, but they were rapidly replaced by Watt engines or retrofitted with a new cylinder and a separate condenser. The atmospheric engine was however far too inefficient for use as a locomotive engine, or as a replacement for water power in most industrial applications.
Probably not (and I'm sure the answer is in the book you mention), since those machines rely on decades of material science, chemical science, tooling, precision, etc.
That said, some mechanisms can (and have) feasibly been used in e.g. Roman times; the Antikythera mechanism and other such archeological discoveries showed they (or the Greeks) had the skills, materials, ability etc to do cogs, gear ratios, etc. It's not a stretch to put that knowledge to work to e.g. do mass production. Actually they had mechanised sawmills for wood and rock as early as the 3rd century insofar as historians have been able to find evidence thereof, it's not a stretch that they could have built those 500 years prior.
This is exactly the type of information you want loaded on a HDD tucked away in case of calamity. You won't be able to find all the parts but the ideas would be invaluable.
You can't store food and water on a hard disk, but you can get food from a combine harvester. Agricultural productivity is critically important for food and drink. The Lykov family partly starved to death one winter because their food production was so marginal that a late frost that spring wiped out their millet production for the year: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lykov_family#History
> Like Spock, from “Star Trek,” Jakubowski has deliberate diction, closely shorn dark hair, and hooded eyes. He also has a Vulcan’s unwavering high-mindedness. His paternal grandfather fought in the Polish underground during the Second World War, helping to derail Nazi trains. A grandmother spent time in a concentration camp. Hearing their stories, Jakubowski concluded that the brutality of war was often a result of privation—an inability to secure the means of survival. His family left Poland when he was ten, in order to escape martial law, and moved to Paterson, New Jersey. The contrast between the abundance in American supermarkets and the empty shelves back home shocked him. “I never forgot about material scarcity,” he told me.
What exactly was the process to choose the 50 machines?
I wonder how "Hay rake" got on the same list as "CNC precision multimachine" for example? If you asked me the former is probably more useful than the latter.
I don't know if you've been on a farm, but things like gasoline engines, welders, and tractors are pretty important there. To make them, you need machining, and the idea of GVCS/OSE/FeF is to be able to do everything.
The "hay rake" in question is supposed to be something comparable to https://www.greenmarkequipment.com/new-equipment/agriculture..., which is a large and complex machine that requires a tractor to tow it. It involves parts such as tires, bearings, nuts, bolts, chains, and wiring, and its main structural frame is rectangular structural framing welded together. You aren't going to be able to make anything comparable by lashing together bamboo. You need a machine shop.
I’m conflicted. Firstly really like this project and its open source and community empowerment ideals. My concern is around how these tools essentially accelerate planetary resource extraction, with from what I can see no discussion or attempt to addesss this potential impact/dynamic.
In addition to bringing about greater freedom and community empowerment the project would benefit from being explicit on how it limits or seeks (even through principals) to limit excessive plantary resource extraction.
There’s a plastics project that illustrates what I mean, they help people make machines that recover and recycle plastic. Circular resource use, make that part of your front and center.
The project seems to be about bootstrapping a civilization after collapse, and you’re worried about... accelerating resource extraction?
None of these machines are cost-effective in the current day world. Actual resource extraction operations are going to use massive machines made by big manufacturers. Small scale hobby miners and such will just order equipment from AliExpress or refurbish old equipment. There is literally zero risk of this project accelerating global resource extraction.
The project seems to be about bootstrapping a civilization after collapse...
leads to: Small scale hobby miners and such will just order equipment from AliExpress
good to know that AliExpress will have the staying power to survive the collapse of civilization. we can all sleep easier knowing that while food/water/fuel will be available to those that can take it, your cheap shit from far away lands will still be a web order away. /s
Neither hobby miners nor large mining companies would be expected to survive civilizational collapse. Hence the desire for a project like this one. I’m not sure how you could misinterpret my reply so completely.
> My concern is around how these tools essentially accelerate planetary resource extraction, with from what I can see no discussion or attempt to addesss this potential impact/dynamic.
You can't meaningfully address that at a grassroots level because of the tragedy of the commons.
You have to engage with that problem at a higher level of organization. (National/Transnational).
The commons were actually fairly well regulated by community norms that were well documented and established. The creation of the notion of the tragedy of the commons was quite possibly propaganda so that large land owners could consolidate and enclosed the commons under the guise that they could manage it better especially after traditions were disrupted.
> The commons were actually fairly well regulated by community norms that were well documented and established.
Not really. You are correctly citing the enclosure acts as a historic example, but that was not beginning or the end of history. It was just a recent, location-specific historic moment when big English landlords won in the millenia-old power struggle between peasant and landlord.
Control of the commons - land and the resources buried in it - has been a point of contention and bloodshed for as long as recorded human history. It's a pendulum that swung back and forth, but has always had bad actors making personally-profitable, socially-impoverishing decisions.
For an alternative example of how things have gone in other places, look at the blood feuds between ranchers and farmers[1] in the American west, concerns over upstream and rainfall water rights in literally any part of the world that relies on irrigation, or, the varied situations where existing landlords politically won the struggle... Or lost it in the 20th century.
As for well-established[2]...
---
[1] The enclosure acts echo this farmer/rancher dichotomy, actually. Feudal lord/serf relationships have the lords derive wealth from having ever more serfs doing ever more labour-intensive agriculture on their land. The enclosure acts, however, were intended to drive the peasants from their land, because in the case of England, the lords figured out that they can derive way more wealth from turning over their land to low-labour grazelands for sheep. And the way they could do that was to use the law as a cudgel to drive out their tenants at sword and gunpoint.
[2] They were only well-established for particular points in history. Prior to William the Conqueror arriving in England, and stealing all the land in it for himself and his mercenaries, there were also 'well-established' land use norms - that greatly limited the power and ownership-of-land granted to lords and petty kings. The Norman conquest turned all that over - into a different 'well-established' equilibrium - that was then, again, turned over into a 'well-established' equilibrium after the passage of the enclosure acts.
Sadly there's a lot of truth there. Generally it's a bad idea to lend tools to people that don't know how to use them. I don't lend my tools to friends,
although I make exceptions when I 100% trust the guy. This is based on experience.
But I'm happy to help, either by me going there or the friend bringing his stuff to my workshop.
They've been mentioned before. They've been at this since at least 2012, and they've only built a few prototype machines. Productivity seems low.
The whole set of machines looks like something China's ministry of agriculture would have come up with around 1980 or so. There are some standard items widely used in rural China and India, manufactured by many manufacturers. Here's a small Diesel engine.[1] This thing is brutally simple - one cylinder, non-recirculating water cooled (you have to add water when you add fuel), hand crank start, no emission controls. Costs about US$300. There's someone who has a YouTube channel of fixing discarded engines of this type. There seem to be a lot of them lying around, all very similar but from different manufacturers. It's the AK-47 of Diesel engines - it's crude, it Just Works, and it can be fixed. It's mass-produced, because making metal parts in quantity is very efficient, while one-offs are too labor intensive.
Here's a basic tractor, the Wuzheng TS, costing around $6,000. "Mature technology", the maker says. There are hundreds of thousands of those things in the Third World.
That's how this gets done in the real world. Mass produced machines of similar design that's proved itself. That's how the US did it, back when the Fordson tractor [3] was popular. Ford produced low-end tractors until 1964.
You can still buy low-end farm equipment cheaply. It's not cost effective for a commercial farm, but it's still available. Sometimes it's all you need.
[1] https://toppower.en.made-in-china.com/product/kmtRnxhrTvpB/C...
[2] https://chinawuzheng.en.made-in-china.com/product/ovGERBPVaa...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fordson
Exactly. Why try to make something open source community stuff when we can just order cheap stuff from China. China is wonderful. China has solved the problem for us. We can rely on China.
Those same Diesel engines are available from India and several other countries. Again, it's like the AK-47. Somebody really good got the design right, and now others can just replicate it.
Diesel engine design is non-trivial. It takes a lot of compression to get the heat necessary for ignition. It takes strong structures to handle that pressure. The fuel injector has to be able to overcome the pressure of compression and spray fuel into the cylinder. You need to get more energy out than you spend on compression and injection. The thermodynamics are complicated. That all gets built into the dimensions of the metal parts, and it all looks simple, but it's not. Those little engines doesn't even need a glow plug to get started. Or even much cranking. They just work. Cheaply.
> Exactly. Why try to make something open source community stuff when we can just order cheap stuff from China.
It's rare to see common sense on Hacker News.
1.4 billion people who get things done verse fat nerds in basements talking stuff and can't even get their theory right. Open sourcing an X they have never actually used.
What is of interest is why China and not Africa or India or Brazil (BRICS+) so much, this is where the discussion is at.
Perhaps, could the fat nerds work with China and do things? This is controversial, NEETs can't even do advanced high school math anymore. They have given up.
Likewise I've seen compact farm equipment, in the same size/weight category as ride-on mowers and handheld cultivators, a bit like the "microcombine" they are advertising - which they don't have a real life link of. See e.g. [0]
I wonder what the purpose of this website is. I suppose if someone wants to start a community or a larger homestead they could use a starter pack, a complete set of all or part of this equipment in a handy storage solution, like a standard container. Wild guess, but I bet you can get a homestead starter kit like that (minus house / building materials) for $100K. (and you probably wouldn't need an aluminium extruder)
[0] https://yongkun1.en.made-in-china.com/product/KTGREaUuorhp/C...
Seems like a neat thought experiment taken to (some stage of) implementation. Like OLPC. Solving problems we think people might have, while missing the more important issues (whatever they may be; I certainly don’t know myself). Idea is nice but feels “too cute”.
I like that it focuses on repairability. Seems like these might be fun to experiment with. Or as a kit for a “homestead” in remote Alaskan wilderness, where you’d like to be able to repair yourself without having to deal with long travel time and expensive shipping.
> The whole set of machines looks like something China's ministry of agriculture would have come up with around 1980 or so
That's the most damning criticism one could make towards a project like this!
If you find the OP interesting, you might find Project Kamp more interesting:
https://projectkamp.com/mission.html
The OP seems like the academic approach to what project kamp is learning by doing: They're attempting to build a community that's eventually completely self sufficient on a fairly limited land space, and documenting the whole process.
I like Project Kamp and have been following them for years. However, I feel they’re moving quite slowly and often making mistakes on problems that have already been solved. For example, it took them a while to figure out their composting toilet, and even now it’s not a great solution.
They tend to have what are essentially interns do a bit of “research” and then piece together a solution. That said, I do applaud their efforts. It’s very entertaining to watch, and they seem to be hiring people lately who are more knowledgeable in their fields.
So, I very much appreciate this open-source-ecology “academic approach.”
I’ve been following Open Source Ecology for years and they too are moving quite slowly. One part of the website points to a 2014 presentation. I’ve seen very little progress in the last ten years. Sad, because it’s a great idea.
That's more or less the critique OSE got back in 2013. Ie. if you're going to raise money, why not hire professional designers?
I wonder if they try to reinvent the wheel on purpose (the "first principles" thing people on HN often mention). Using off-the-shelf products can feel like cheating if your objective is to protest society / capitalism.
Project Kamp would definitely benefit from opening up a new workshop on site with the sole purpose of building some of the Open Source Ecology tooling .. it'd help them immensely with tractor scams and .. especially of course .. defeating the neverending onslaught of Spikey Booshes ..
Efficiency I get, self sufficiency I don't get. Self sufficiency is net terrible as impact to the globe. It's obvious that specialization+trade gives us much more efficiency, be it in raw material usage, power usage, you name it, to create whatever product. Even space usage requirements balloon if everyone wants to be self sufficient.
If people want to optimize for self sufficiency they will need to hoard more stuff, they will need to produce and duplicate a lot, use more land and for sure they won't have any good stuff like doctors with a surgery room.
Self sufficiency is usually a goal for those who want to avoid a systems collapse. When everyone is highly specialized and dependent on one another, failure in one part (especially if that part is logistical) cascades throughout the whole. For example, if the town’s petroleum distributor burns down, how long will residents be able to convey food home or products to market? If global shipping failed today, how long would it take for other nations to run out of food and pharmacological needs and silicon? If China destroyed the chip fabs in Taiwan by accident during an invasion, how long does it take the rest of the world to recover? During the pandemic we saw how vulnerable economic systems are to supply chain shocks, so it’s not unreasonable for people in the wake of that experience to seek a world with less exposure to that risk.
I would argue that mutual reliance actually makes the system as a whole more resilient.
If you think you don’t need that petroleum distributor, you won’t put any effort into preventing its destruction. Not my problem, right?
Oops, but I forgot that even though I’m self sufficient in energy (maybe I have solar panels and batteries) it turns out I still need plastic! I guess I did need that distributor after all. Shame I didn’t realize that before it burned down.
> If global shipping failed today, how long would it take for other nations to run out of food and pharmacological needs and silicon?
I don’t think it’s worth worrying about “what happens if the hand of god comes down tomorrow and deletes all ocean vessels and doesn’t touch anything else.” There isn’t a plausible scenario where global shipping—and nothing else—fails. You might as well start making contingency plans for if the sun gets turned into green cheese.
To your point about the pandemic: the experiment we did was “what happens when you turn off labor in all sectors at once?” We would have had exactly the same result even if every country were self sufficient.
It turns out that effectively no human has been self sufficient for millennia. American settlers on the Great Plains needed iron nails and barbed wire from back east. Native Americans traded furs for guns with Europeans because it was mutually beneficial. All over the world people lived in groups because specialization and trading (even if they didn’t call it that) enabled a higher quality of living than gathering berries all alone.
"and for sure they won't have any good stuff like doctors with a surgery room."
Depends how big the project/village is.
Also the basic idea is to be as self sufficient as possible. Not as a dogma.
And the benefit once it runs is, you don't have to go make war around the globe, because your economy is threatened. You can just stay at home minding your own buisness.
Interestingly, it's the exact opposite view that laid the foundation of the EU [0]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schuman_Declaration
I do enjoy the freedom of movement in the EU, but don't enjoy the regulation of cucumbers. (At least they relaxed those by now, but they still move the parliament every month, because they cannot agree on one place, I rather mind my own buisness than dealing with that)
Isolationism doesn’t work as a policy, that is proven by history. Or if it works it needs some radically different ideas. The aspect about ignoring defense is also naive, what happens when your neighbours that do have a military decide your land and self sufficiency are something they want? The best thing to prevent that, and the first step, is to have established trade with them, which in your plan you don't want or need.
Also you will breed a population of "nationalists" (at whatever size this is applied to) after a few generations if nobody is involved in trade.
"Isolationism doesn’t work as a policy, that is proven by history."
Of course it does. Many remote mountain villages preserved their culture this way.
"Also you will breed a population of "nationalists" "
I think you have never been to such a self sustainable project?
They are usually living a culture of internationalists and there are frequent guests from all around the world.
What you means are cults. They also exist, true. But those operating in the open are mostly .. open.
Also the basic idea is to establish a network of trading and sharing in general. Specialisation is useful after all. But for the basic needs, I like the idea to be independent here.
And yes, ideally also have a competent doctor you can just wake up from next door in the middle of the night in a case of emergency and not hope a ambulance is avaiable in time.
> I think you have never been to such a self sustainable project?
They are usually living a culture of internationalists and there are frequent guests from all around the world.
You're taking about who thinks it's cool to try to do this kind of thing. The post your replying to is trying to predict how things might evolve over a (very) long time in case of actual success.
Isolationism only works for remote mountain villages because they don't have any resources worth taking. That solution doesn't scale.
Did you intentionally cut off "after generations" to respond to a point I didn't make? I said nothing about the 0th or 1st generation.
It seems we are not talking about the same thing. You seem to be talking about strict isolationists. Those are usually of the cult type and no doubt they will all create their version of nationalism likely within the 1. Generation.
But all the other self sustainable projects that I know, are far from the idea of wanting to shut themself of the world.
The main idea is just to not be so dependent on the crazyness of this world. But still be connected to the world. Trade, travel, exchange, ..
How many of those projects have been going for more than 3 generations? Why do you think all the last times it was attempted it turns to that? Most of the undisturbed tribes kill intruders on sight. Most countries that ever turned to isolationism have their population suffer vs their neighbours when enough time passes. I said nothing about the intentions of who starts these communities, that barely matters, what matters is the system they put in place after a few generations. If the system is flawed good intentions go nowhere because after a few generations you don't have a group of idealists anymore, you have random people operating in an isolationist system and they'll act according to their incentives.
We should maximize cooperation between communities, not restrict it. It's the best way to avoid war long term.
I think any serious countries of the future will spend substantial resources planting self-sufficiency caches every so many kilo acres. Students should be taught the basics of booting and sustaining a self-sufficient pod.
It shouldn’t be about isolationism / anarchy, but about limiting the blast radius for any given disaster.
Finally it also serves as a center for rehab, starting from scratch, and community service. The ultimate social safety net.
> The ultimate social safety net.
For the few that live, I suppose. But this is like an almost-worst-case scenario where the people are some of the few (1%) to survive. Most disasters, even all-out war like in Ukraine or Gaza have relatively few casualties, but they all have needs. The program in Denmark where they start up emergency stores (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45216805) makes a lot more sense in that regard.
People should always have emergency supplies to last up to three days for the fairly common scenario of power outages, supply chain disruptions and extreme weather events. If you live in a disaster prone area, a week's worth of supplies should still be manageable. Anything worse than that and it's probably best to evacuate. Only the rich have the space, time and means to dig in for longer, think people with bomb shelters, storage basements, and a lifestyle of living on preserved foods (because you need to rotate things on a regular basis).
I’m thinking the vast majority of the value comes not from enabling survival but from de-alienation, which I believe is fundamental in reaching a better overall state.
>Self sufficiency is net terrible as impact to the globe. It's obvious that specialization+trade gives us much more efficiency, be it in raw material usage, power usage, you name it, to create whatever product. Even space usage requirements balloon if everyone wants to be self sufficient.
I think you forget that the alternative hides a ton of externalities. For example those massive agri corporations are vaaaastly more efficient than me or my grandpa working our own gardens. But we aren't spraying or the like to contribute to insect population collapse. We're being rather damn space efficient, yet we don't use any fertilisers from gas and mining. We don't compact the soil or lose topsoil. and what we do produce is less deficient in micronutrients.
And as someone else already said. It really just means more self-sufficient.
Big agri corps can afford large tractors that till, plant and harvest more efficiently. They can afford to buy remote sensing imagery to optimize planting. In other words, there exist scale effects in agriculture.
You lose those effects if every hundred acres needs to produce all of needs of a human family. Self sufficient is less efficient.
You can bring back some of those effects with co-ops, but now it starts looking like a single large business with many owners again.
That's indeed what I was saying.
You don't get those things when being a lot more sustainable. You're not being more efficient with resources like time, labour, etc.
But I'm not pumping up gas for it, making the insect populations go into freefall as much, etc Am I being more efficient in my use of those?
Maybe this maxim within our software world might help: "Be loosely coupled, tightly cohesive".
Decoupling (the kind of self-sufficiency you are envisioning) is only a distant goal for interplanetary colonization. Loose coupling is fine as baby steps. As long as within their community they are tightly cohesive, they will do fine.
The intent is sustainable resiliency baked into our systems.
Lots of link rot in their list of stuff. Starting at the top of the list for the 3D printer goes to an Amazon 404. The John Deere twine baler redirects to Deere's home page.
Is this something that has since been abandoned and being shown here for historical purposes? An example of another panacea idea that just lost internet steam?
I noticed too and gave up trying to find a working link to the retail models. From what I can tell the site was last updated in 2014
They're actively pushing it on Instagram interestingly enough.
Comments here are a bit rough. Marcin does plenty of work for OSE and the community is still active but most of it is in-person/offline -- hard for a lot of us to believe, I know, but there is human activity that takes place outside the internet.
Or so I'm told.
New Yorker covered the organisational issues in 2013: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/12/23/the-civilizati...
About the churn: "By February, 2013, all the O.S.E. collaborators had left the farm."
This is a somewhat similar project, a very small project in early stages, but interesting.
https://github.com/civboot/civboot https://github.com/civboot/civboot/tree/main/blog
I’m from the self-replicating self-reconfigurable systems side.
The problem with this is not about making the machines but the human intervention to make use of them effectively. You really need end-to-end automation to solve this.
If i don’t remember wrongly all this started due to john deere implementing DRM in their equipment. this is a political problem because the issue can be resolved by just buying chinese equivalents and changing patent/ip law.
In Dan Wang’s recent “Breakneck” he makes the case that process knowledge is what really drives technological cultures, not the creation of tools or blueprints. He questions whether blueprints of any specificity, sent back to Roman times, would be enough to build something like an automobile or combine.
Steam power wasn't feasible until the Bessemer process and rolled sheet steel made the creation of pressure vessels a reliable and repeatable process.
An internal combustion engine requires that, plus ceramics and an alloy suited to high temperatures (for the spark plugs) as well as copper or aluminum for wiring.
A good book which covers this is:
https://goodreads.com/book/show/35068671-the-perfectionists
>Steam power wasn't feasible until the Bessemer process and rolled sheet steel made the creation of pressure vessels a reliable and repeatable process.
Also precision boring to produce tight-fitting cylinders. James Watt spent nearly a decade trying to build a viable steam engine, but only succeeded after John Wilkinson invented a machine to bore cannon barrels in 1774. It turns out that making a hole that is straight, deep and round is fiendishly difficult without specialist equipment and expertise.
> Also precision boring to produce tight-fitting cylinders.
Which is what the GP's referenced book, The Perfectionists, is all about. There's an entire chapter on Watt and Wilkinson.
Your chronology is backwards.
Newcomen's steam-engine, the first commercially successful one, was 01712. James Watt's steam engine was 01776. Trevithick's high-pressure engine patent, which is the point at which steam-engines started needing pressure vessels as opposed to vacuum vessels, was 01802. Trevithick's first steam-powered train was 01804. The Bessemer process was 01856, after the end of the steam-engine-driven First Industrial Revolution. But steel was still not in wide use for pressure vessels until I think about 01880, but I'm less sure of that.
Diesel engines are internal combustion engines that do not require spark plugs or wiring.
Ceramics are from about 12000 years ago, and copper is from about 8500 years ago. The hard part about wires is more the insulation than the wire itself.
Did you get your errors from Winchester's book? I usually think of him as more reliable than that.
Steam power started with atmospheric engines which didn't need steel.
Not for anything useful.
To be fair, the atmospheric engine was just barely practical for pumping water out of mines. Newcomen sold over a hundred of them, but they were rapidly replaced by Watt engines or retrofitted with a new cylinder and a separate condenser. The atmospheric engine was however far too inefficient for use as a locomotive engine, or as a replacement for water power in most industrial applications.
Watt engines were also atmospheric engines, but the rest of your comment is correct.
Probably not (and I'm sure the answer is in the book you mention), since those machines rely on decades of material science, chemical science, tooling, precision, etc.
That said, some mechanisms can (and have) feasibly been used in e.g. Roman times; the Antikythera mechanism and other such archeological discoveries showed they (or the Greeks) had the skills, materials, ability etc to do cogs, gear ratios, etc. It's not a stretch to put that knowledge to work to e.g. do mass production. Actually they had mechanised sawmills for wood and rock as early as the 3rd century insofar as historians have been able to find evidence thereof, it's not a stretch that they could have built those 500 years prior.
This is exactly the type of information you want loaded on a HDD tucked away in case of calamity. You won't be able to find all the parts but the ideas would be invaluable.
I think in case of calamity I'd rather eat / drink than extrude aluminium and build combine harvesters, but ok.
You can't store food and water on a hard disk, but you can get food from a combine harvester. Agricultural productivity is critically important for food and drink. The Lykov family partly starved to death one winter because their food production was so marginal that a late frost that spring wiped out their millet production for the year: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lykov_family#History
More like etched on a stone tablet.... or disc.
Maybe a metal disc, with a protective plastic coating?
From the New Yorker article in 02013 at https://archive.fo/l0jfL:
> Like Spock, from “Star Trek,” Jakubowski has deliberate diction, closely shorn dark hair, and hooded eyes. He also has a Vulcan’s unwavering high-mindedness. His paternal grandfather fought in the Polish underground during the Second World War, helping to derail Nazi trains. A grandmother spent time in a concentration camp. Hearing their stories, Jakubowski concluded that the brutality of war was often a result of privation—an inability to secure the means of survival. His family left Poland when he was ten, in order to escape martial law, and moved to Paterson, New Jersey. The contrast between the abundance in American supermarkets and the empty shelves back home shocked him. “I never forgot about material scarcity,” he told me.
Hydraulic motor, but no hoses or compressor?
3D printer, but no filament?
It says the design of the 3D printer is done. But on the 3D printer page, there's nothing, no design documents, just a picture.
As seen in a 2011 TED talk: https://www.ted.com/talks/marcin_jakubowski_open_sourced_blu...
Honestly, I wished this is something like a Colin Furze or Watch Wes Work would take on to bring projects over the finish line.
this gave me a lot of faith in humanity. back in ~2014.
still cool. still something i want to see in the world. but not super dynamic.
Color me disappointed, I was hoping for a Lego set based on the works of Marshall McLuhan
It would be cool to see this project re-done with modern tools and a new generation of engineering talent.
As others have pointed out, the idea is really cool, but the implementation was never there.
So that's what G.E.C.K. would look like!
What exactly was the process to choose the 50 machines?
I wonder how "Hay rake" got on the same list as "CNC precision multimachine" for example? If you asked me the former is probably more useful than the latter.
I don't know if you've been on a farm, but things like gasoline engines, welders, and tractors are pretty important there. To make them, you need machining, and the idea of GVCS/OSE/FeF is to be able to do everything.
The "hay rake" in question is supposed to be something comparable to https://www.greenmarkequipment.com/new-equipment/agriculture..., which is a large and complex machine that requires a tractor to tow it. It involves parts such as tires, bearings, nuts, bolts, chains, and wiring, and its main structural frame is rectangular structural framing welded together. You aren't going to be able to make anything comparable by lashing together bamboo. You need a machine shop.
I'd say the former won't last if you can't fabricate or fix a simple part for which you might need the later.
I’m conflicted. Firstly really like this project and its open source and community empowerment ideals. My concern is around how these tools essentially accelerate planetary resource extraction, with from what I can see no discussion or attempt to addesss this potential impact/dynamic.
In addition to bringing about greater freedom and community empowerment the project would benefit from being explicit on how it limits or seeks (even through principals) to limit excessive plantary resource extraction.
There’s a plastics project that illustrates what I mean, they help people make machines that recover and recycle plastic. Circular resource use, make that part of your front and center.
The project seems to be about bootstrapping a civilization after collapse, and you’re worried about... accelerating resource extraction?
None of these machines are cost-effective in the current day world. Actual resource extraction operations are going to use massive machines made by big manufacturers. Small scale hobby miners and such will just order equipment from AliExpress or refurbish old equipment. There is literally zero risk of this project accelerating global resource extraction.
The project seems to be about bootstrapping a civilization after collapse...
leads to: Small scale hobby miners and such will just order equipment from AliExpress
good to know that AliExpress will have the staying power to survive the collapse of civilization. we can all sleep easier knowing that while food/water/fuel will be available to those that can take it, your cheap shit from far away lands will still be a web order away. /s
Neither hobby miners nor large mining companies would be expected to survive civilizational collapse. Hence the desire for a project like this one. I’m not sure how you could misinterpret my reply so completely.
It's extremely self-limiting compared to the real industrial processes that we're actually using.
> My concern is around how these tools essentially accelerate planetary resource extraction, with from what I can see no discussion or attempt to addesss this potential impact/dynamic.
You can't meaningfully address that at a grassroots level because of the tragedy of the commons.
You have to engage with that problem at a higher level of organization. (National/Transnational).
The commons were actually fairly well regulated by community norms that were well documented and established. The creation of the notion of the tragedy of the commons was quite possibly propaganda so that large land owners could consolidate and enclosed the commons under the guise that they could manage it better especially after traditions were disrupted.
> The commons were actually fairly well regulated by community norms that were well documented and established.
Not really. You are correctly citing the enclosure acts as a historic example, but that was not beginning or the end of history. It was just a recent, location-specific historic moment when big English landlords won in the millenia-old power struggle between peasant and landlord.
Control of the commons - land and the resources buried in it - has been a point of contention and bloodshed for as long as recorded human history. It's a pendulum that swung back and forth, but has always had bad actors making personally-profitable, socially-impoverishing decisions.
For an alternative example of how things have gone in other places, look at the blood feuds between ranchers and farmers[1] in the American west, concerns over upstream and rainfall water rights in literally any part of the world that relies on irrigation, or, the varied situations where existing landlords politically won the struggle... Or lost it in the 20th century.
As for well-established[2]...
---
[1] The enclosure acts echo this farmer/rancher dichotomy, actually. Feudal lord/serf relationships have the lords derive wealth from having ever more serfs doing ever more labour-intensive agriculture on their land. The enclosure acts, however, were intended to drive the peasants from their land, because in the case of England, the lords figured out that they can derive way more wealth from turning over their land to low-labour grazelands for sheep. And the way they could do that was to use the law as a cudgel to drive out their tenants at sword and gunpoint.
[2] They were only well-established for particular points in history. Prior to William the Conqueror arriving in England, and stealing all the land in it for himself and his mercenaries, there were also 'well-established' land use norms - that greatly limited the power and ownership-of-land granted to lords and petty kings. The Norman conquest turned all that over - into a different 'well-established' equilibrium - that was then, again, turned over into a 'well-established' equilibrium after the passage of the enclosure acts.
Someone only has to take part in a makerspace to see tragedy of the commons in action.
Precisely.
A few decent folks try to start up a great idea. More join. Some dont share the ideals.
More join, less ideals shared.
More join. Cool, free shit! (Not really, but this is when the commons is shit on and good will starts being lost.)
Group starts cracking at the scenes. Factions form. Badness sets in. Thefts spike. Abuse and vandalization of equipment is the norm.
I left my local makerspace for these above reasons. And I made my own. Cost more, but my equipment works and is right there.
Sadly there's a lot of truth there. Generally it's a bad idea to lend tools to people that don't know how to use them. I don't lend my tools to friends, although I make exceptions when I 100% trust the guy. This is based on experience.
But I'm happy to help, either by me going there or the friend bringing his stuff to my workshop.