Spaceship Earth

Forty-six years ago this October at the Shoreham Hotel in Washington DC Buckminster Fuller gave a talk entitled, "Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth"

http://www.therealityfiles.com/wp-co...ing-manual.pdf


I am always inspired by Fuller's vision to build a better world here using space technologies.

Consider that the world today has 7.057 billions of us. With an average family size of 4.3 persons this means we need 1,641,162,791 homes to house all of us.

Consider lot sizes of 60 ft x 60 ft and house sizes between 2,250 sq ft and 3,500 sq ft. This web site has 851 house plans that meet this criterion.

http://www.theplancollection.com/hou.../most-popular/

We have sufficient resources on Earth to build these homes and supply them with water, power, food, medicines, transport and information using a variety of modern technologies.

http://www.scribd.com/doc/106112900/Resources

We build them quickly with self-replicating solar powered machines.

http://www.scribd.com/doc/77588930/Brand-New-World

This research shows the flow of material needed each day to sustain an 85 kg adult male;

http://www.nss.org/settlement/Coloni...ce/fig0903.gif

Each home must be equipped to supply 11 kg of varied food products per day, along with medicinal herbs and remedies and other flavourings and scents, soaps and organic sustainable cleaning products.

This is supplied by automated aeroponics. These are already on the market;

http://www.sustainablefrontiers.com/aeroponics.php

Total weight of materials per home averages 605,000 pounds.

There are 2.87 million self replicating machine cells per ounce. Each machine cell 1/110th inch in diameter. 605,000 pounds of them total 27.85 trillion cells. This is enough to build a self sufficient, self maintaining home.

Starting with one cell we can see that it will take

LN(2.785e+13)/ln(2) = 44.662

doublings to make a house with aeroponics greenhouse along with self replicating machine shop and family aerial transporter drones.

Once we have sufficient machine cells to make a single home it takes only

LN(1.642e+9)/ln(2) = 30.613

more doublings to make a house with factory farm transporter and digital wireless relay for every man woman and child on the planet.

A total of 75.275 doubling periods. Now during the hours of daylight above the clouds, free flying machine cells self replicate three times per day using the water vapour and CO2 in the atmosphere.

This means it will take less than a month using this technique to build a home for everyone starting with one machine cell.

This requires 975.87 trillion pounds of plastics made from 3.0675 quadrillion pounds of CO2 and 1.2547 quadrillion pounds of water vapour using sunlight.

The Earth's atmosphere weighs 11.595 quintillion pounds. It contains 347.85 quadrillion pounds of water vapour and 7.0845 quadrillion pounds of CO2.

Removing 2.0368 quadrillion pounds of CO2 from the air restores CO2 levels to pre-industrial values. The balance of carbon is obtained from carbonates in the ocean. Removal of these restores ocean acidity to pre-industrial levels as well.

Each home along with all is machinery and vehicles is powered by hydrogen produced by free flying machine cells using water vapour and sunlight. A pound of cells, consisting of 46.033 million cells intercepts 7,650 watts of sunlight produces 3.76 ounces of hydrogen per hour of exposure. In the stratosphere well above most clouds a pound of cells produce 2.82 pounds of hydrogen per day and deliver that hydrogen to homes and vehicles as needed where needed.

Transport is via hydrogen fuelled propulsive skin vehicles similar to this;

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wOAWq5pXmGg

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7a5e8pFI3H0

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_CAQz9eEACs

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CRFRxErGDaI

http://jalopnik.com/5067911/audi-cal...o-higher-level


With a 60 foot by 60 foot area per self-contained housing lot we use 5.9082 trillion square feet (211,927 square miles) of land surface. This is only 1/658th of the 139.48 million square miles of land surface of the Earth.

Spread out in a hexagonal close packed array across 25% of the surface of the Earth, best suited for this type of construction, with least interference from others, each home is separated from its neighbour by 97 feet and occupies a 60 ft x 60 ft lot.

At an average speed of 600 mph for the flying cars, and allowing 40 minutes travel time to define one's 'home-town' we can see that in 40 minutes a person travels a 400 mile range. An area 502,654 square miles. Within this area there are 23.7 million homes and 101.7 million people.

There are 12.87 million products that are indexed by humanity

http://www.upcindex.com/

The design or seed stock for each of these is replicated and kept in each home, so that any person any where at any time may produce any of these items at no cost on demand.

In this environment money is defined as useful time and attention of others.. An interesting definition for a dollar in this environment therefore is 1 second of time equals 1 cent of value. So, everyone makes $36.00 per hour. Money is created when one person makes a demand on another person. So, if I ask you to cook my breakfast, and clean my room, and it takes you two hours, I pay you $72. I create the $72 if I don't have it. This creates a negative balance of ($72) for me - and an obligation to do something useful for someone sometime in the future. For holding that debt I pay 4% interest compounded. I also have an obligation to pay it off in seven years. So, this gives a requirement to do something useful for someone else at a rate of

R = PMT(0.04,7,72)/12 = $1.00

per month. Or, I must be useful to someone at a rate of 100 seconds per month or more, to support this debt. There are limits of course. Generally speaking however, most people will be useful to others enough so that they can make reasonable demands on others as well.

This is all handled by a tensor processing scheme through portable handsets

http://vimeo.com/29419399

Beyond interpersonal relations there are larger enterprises that organize entire companies of individuals along specific lines. These are supported by extension of these basic concepts along viable economic lines.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s-Qg-2d50Eo

creating money out of nothing constrained by availability of resources and human time and attention.