Starting a New Civilisation from the Ground Up

Global Village Construction Set - TED Talk from Open Source Ecology on Vimeo.

Have you ever considered how you would go about re-starting civilisation if the Earth were struck by a comet, or suffered some other widescale, civilisation-ending catastrophe? The people at Open Source Ecology have, and they are in the process of building the Global Village Construction Sett.

This construction set is a platform which will allow you to build 50 industrial machines that you can use to re-build civilisation from the ground up.

The complete Global Village Construction Set will include 50 different industrial machines, from tractors and sawmills to wind turbines and steam generators and CNC mills and 3D printers and laser cutters. Apparently, with all 50 of these machines, you can create "a small civilization with modern comforts." Yep, that's all it takes. So far, they've prototyped eight of these machines, and with help from Kickstarter, they're hoping to get to work on the other 42 to make them available to hopeful developing civilizations all over the world. _DVice

What Makes the Global Village Construction Set so special?

Open Source- we freely publish our 3d designs, schematics, instructional videos, budgets, and product manuals on our open source wiki and we harness open collaboration with contributors.
Low-Cost- The cost of making or buying our machines are, on average, 8x cheaper than buying from an Industrial Manufacturer, including an average labor cost of $15 hour for a GVCS fabricator and using mail-order parts.
Modular- Motors, parts, assemblies, and power units can interchange.
User-Serviceable - Design-for-disassembly allows the user to take apart, maintain, and fix tools readily without the need to rely on expensive repairmen.
DIY - The user gains control of designing, producing, and modifying the GVCS tool set.
Closed Loop Manufacturing - Metal is an essential component of advanced civilization, and our platform allows for recycling metal into virgin feedstock for producing further GVCS technologies - thereby allowing for cradle-to-cradle manufacturing cycles
High Performance - Performance standards must match or exceed those of industrial counterparts for the GVCS to be viable.
Flexible Fabrication - It has been demonstrated that the flexible use of generalized machinery in appropriate-scale production is a viable alternative to centralized production.
Open Business Models - We encourage the replication of enterprises that derive from the GVCS platform as a route to truly free enterprise - along the ideals of Jeffersonian democracy.
Industrial Efficiency - In order to provide a viable choice for a resilient lifestyle, the GVCS platform matches or exceeds productivity standards of industrial counterparts. _Global Village Construction Set

Cross-posted to Al Fin, the Next Level

This type of hands-on, can-do creative tinkering-in-depth, is something that has been largely lost in an American society that has handed its children over to an irresponsible and untrustworthy academia. The result of this misplaced trust, and low rates of trained practical competencies, is the higher education bubble, high unemployment, lowered rates of inventions and independent business startups, and an extremely unhealthy growth in dependency on government.