A couple of days ago, I caught a story on NPR about Open Source Ecology, an initiative begun by a young astrophysicist, Marcin Jakuboski. As he explains in his TED Talk, he found himself, at the end of his twenties, book-smart and real-world useless. Searching for something more tangible to do with his life, he tried to go back to the land, becoming a farmer in rural Missouri. He found his plans stymied again by unreliable machinery. As he tells it, Marcin was then inspired to build his own tractor, using a "simple X, Y, Z geometry" and an interchangeable, de-mountable hydraulic power plant.
This led to a wiki, which led to global collaboration, which spiraled into a project that hopes to open-source fifty industrial machines essential to humanity. Jakuboski calls it a "civilization starter kit." As the idea snowballed, he became a TED fellow and has now turned his property, the Factor E Farm, into a laboratory for prototyping these machines. As of this fall, employees and volunteers are hard at work building an compacted earth-brick and strawbale lab and dormitory where designers, engineers, and builders will live and work on the GVCS. The structures on the farm are being built with the GVCS brick press, the soil pulverizer, and the LifeTrac tractor, directly testing prototypes as they are created.
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| The LifeTrac, the first project in the Global Village Construction Set. |
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| The Global Village Construction Set, via Wikipedia. |
