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from the does-anyone-have-to-go-outside-to-clean-the-sensors? dept.
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2020/aug/01/3m-price-tag-inside-luxury-doomsday-bunker
Afraid of nuclear war, natural disasters, economic meltdown? The Survival Condo could be the answer
"Mechanical level", "medical level", "store level" the voice announces as the lift descends into the earth. I'd entered at parking lot level, the building's apex. I am travelling through an inverted skyscraper, the floor numbers ascending – third, fourth – as we plumb the building's depths. A hulking man in his late 50s called Larry Hall stands next to me, whistling, black shirt tucked into blue jeans.
When the doors open, I can't suppress a laugh. In front of us, four storeys below central Kansas, is a supermarket complete with shopping baskets, cold cabinets and an espresso machine behind the counter. Hall smiles.
"It's good, isn't it? On the original blueprint for the renovation, it just said 'storerooms' on this level. The psychologist we hired for the project took one look at that and said, 'No, no, no, this needs to feel like a miniature Whole Foods supermarket. We need a tile floor and nicely presented cases, because if people are locked in this silo and they have to come down here and rifle through cardboard boxes to get their food, you'll have depressed people everywhere.'"
I am inside the most lavish and sophisticated private bunker in the world: the Survival Condo. It was once a cold war US government missile silo. Constructed in the early 60s, at a cost of approximately $15m to the US taxpayer, it was one of 72 structures built to protect [against] a nuclear warhead 100 times more powerful than the bomb dropped on Nagasaki. Many of these silos were blown up and buried after decades of disuse. But not all of them.
(Score: 3, Informative) by pdfernhout on Monday August 03 2020, @03:56PM (1 child)
(my site, circa 1999) https://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/goals.htm [kurtz-fernhout.com]
"The OSCOMAK [Open-Source Community on Manufacturing Knowledge] project is an attempt to create a core of communities more in control of their technological destiny and its social implications. No single design for a community or technology will please everyone, or even many people. Nor would a single design be likely to survive. So this project endeavors to gather information and to develop tools and processes that all fit together conceptually like Tinkertoys or Legos. The result will be a library of possibilities that individuals in a community can use to achieve any degree of self-sufficiency and self-replication within any size community, from one person to a billion people. Within every community people will interact with these possibilities by using them and extending them to design a community economy and physical layout that suits their needs and ideas.
As the internet has grown, it has enabled collaborative work which has created many success stories, including Linux, Python, GCC, Squeak and other projects. We want to harness that power and apply it to organizing technological knowledge in concert with many interested individuals.
The main project goal is to develop an on-line library of technology ideas, techniques, and tools, including a range from high-tech processes like plastics to medium-tech like ceramic houses to low-tech like spinning wheels. Also included will be biotechnology processes, like perennial agriculture, companion planting, sheep farming, and eventually cloning and DNA synthesis."
If nothing bad happens like global war or economic collapse, then at least with such a project we have the knowledge to make self-replicating habitats in the ocean or in space -- plus it could be a lot of fun for some to make their own stuff. If TSHTF, then we have the knowledge we need to survive, rebuild, and hopefully do better next time.
But realistically I have not made much progress on that over the last two decades. So much to do (on top of a full-time job), so little time and (remaining) emotional energy... Was disappointed when the Buckminster Fuller Institute' contest picked some specific tech advance over something like OSCOMAK that celebrates Bucky Fuller's Design Science idea. Anyway, I am glad a lot of other people are working on related things in various ways.
The biggest challenge of the 21st century: the irony of technologies of abundance used by scarcity-minded people.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 03 2020, @08:50PM
Thanks for working on that.