Fwd: Funding open manufacturing standards to promote space habitats (was: Space Manufacturing 14 Call...)
Paul D. Fernhout
Thomas Fledrich wrote:
> Paul, I see your paper was focusing mainly at the organizational
> structure of different possible ways of cooperation, but you seem to
> forget that there is more to actually building working hardware than
> just making CAD drawings.
> We still need the tools and raw materials to make it and places to
> assemble and test it. In todays world it takes a lot of money to acquire
> these resources. Most people won't be able to afford it individually and
> unfortunately the amount of funds non-profit organizations have been
> able to put together from membership fees and donations so far is way
> less than what would be needed even to build just a simple orbital
> vehicle, let alone space colonies.
For reference (because I intend to forward this to the Virgle list):
http://ssi.org/2010/06/space-manufacturing-14-call-for-papers/
http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/msg/131832bb828b3677
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/SSI_Fernhout2001_web.html
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/KFReviewPaperForSSIConference2001.pdf
My theory is that more and more testing and refinement can be done in
simulation, as computers get faster and the basic science better understood.
If we can get a trillion person hours worth of effort together to build a
design for a seed for a self-replicating space habitat (that could duplicate
itself from sunlight and asteroidal ore) then I feel confident we could find
a billionaire (or government) to put up a billion dollars (even ten) for
launch cost and construction costs for a few real hardware missions.
So, design it and they will come. Where are the designs for such a seed that
unfolds into such a habitat?
What are the real bottlenecks to such a design?
See also my comment:
"Jeff Bezos' Shot At Space: Both CATS and DOGS are needed..."
http://groups.google.com/group/virgle/msg/f65a889ca9a6b2c1?pli=1
"So where is a key area of research that should be a priority among
NASA and Billionaires, but is not heavily pursued? The issue is what
to do in space once you have gotten there. Because if there is a
reason to be in space, then people and collectives will work to get
there. And the reality is, that right now, if we could get there,
there is nothing to do there short of look around and come back. And
if that were the case, Space would not deserve much more investment
than say tourism to Mt. Everest. The reality is that we don't know how
to support human life in space -- in large part because we have only
spent a pittance on thinking about that issue systematically compared
to the issues of CATS and Planetary Exploration. Frankly, while we
support human life on earth, we have very little meta-knowledge
formally about how to do even that. And, most of figuring out how to
support human life in space at a nuts and bolts level requires non-sexy
activities like sitting around and staring out the window,
talking, sending emails, building databases, building software tools,
building some small physical protoypes on tabletops and outdoors, and
just plain thinking (the hard stuff). This is all the preparation
needed for the spiritual voyage into the (physical) heavens. ..."
> I hope open source space will happen in the future, but the requirements
> are clearly not met yet. The tasks to be done now in Open Manufacturing
> are setting up a standardized database for blueprints and building
> simple local hackerspaces that can be used for automated manufacturing
> of relatively simple hardware. Even this requires quite some initial
> investment and I hope it will evolve into something much bigger later
> on, but let's just do one thing at a time :-)
Someone who is socially clever maybe can get Google to help with that? :-)
A starting point:
"SVG and the Indexing of Web Standards"
http://slashdot.org/story/10/07/10/2141224/SVG-and-the-Indexing-of-Web-Standards
"The world's most popular search engine company is a leading supporter of
open standards. It pours money and people into initiatives that promote,
assist, support and implement Web standards. As a core foundation of is
mission statement, all web assets should ideally be of a kind that it can
work with. Strange then, that the world's most popular search engine doesn't
index all of the current important Web standards formats. Doug Schepers of
W3C blogs about how Scalable Vector Graphics content is recognized and not
recognized by search engines, currently and historically."
Based on that logic, why should Google not pour, say, a billion dollars into
refining and promoting open standards for open manufacturing content
(manufacturing recipes), plus help move a lot of basic initial content into
that standard?
Just one first cut by me a decade ago, much fancier XML/RDF stuff exists now
(and probably also did then): :-)
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/prototype.htm
NIST SLIM, SKDB, Appropedia, etc. are all moving in that sort of direction...
http://www.nist.gov/mel/msid/dpg/slim.cfm
http://github.com/kanzure/skdb
http://www.appropedia.org/
--Paul Fernhout
http://www.pdfernhout.net/
http://knol.google.com/k/paul-d-fernhout/beyond-a-jobless-recovery/38e2u3s23jer/2
====
The biggest challenge of the 21st century is the irony of technologies of
abundance in the hands of those thinking in terms of scarcity.