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Tangible problems.

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I always felt from as long as I can remember about the power of science,

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that it could be used to solve pressing issues, solve problems.

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When I studied Chemistry at Princeton it was so theoretical, unapplied.

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And I thought oh ok, maybe if I go into physics it will get better.

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So I did, and was grossly disappointed.

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We were studying wave propagation, and I couldn't understand this one problem, this one equation.

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So I went to the professor and I said whats this about, where does this exist?

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And he said well it actually doesn't exist, I just made it up.

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It's like, oh ok, so that's what we do here.

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That was one of those turning points where I said, wow what am I doing here?

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In an absolute abundance of resources, power,

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human development and culture and everything,

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still there's many issues. Mainly the resource conflicts. Poverty, war, depravation.

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Survival with the awesome technology that we do have today?

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Survival should not take a lot of time.

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When you really think about it, all the wealth that we enjoy today for a modern standard of living

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relies on rocks, soil, sunlight, plants, water.

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Those are all abundant.

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Yet the productive mechanism of society is what makes it scarce, artificially so.

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What if we could survive and thrive up to a modern standard of living,

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and not only that, at two hours a day of work, and from local resources.

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How would that be?

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The most important part of Open Source Ecology is this idea that

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with a small amount of resources and a small amount of money,

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anybody should be able to create a high standard of living for themselves,

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and do it in a way that doesn't require a whole lot of time, a whole lot of money.

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People can actually be empowered but he technology we're creating here,

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so rather than a big corporation deciding what machines can do for us,

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we can decide how we want machines to work for us.

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Instead of relying on other people to make things that we need,

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we can make everything that we need for ourselves

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And we can do it better than Walmart can do it,

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we can do it better than slave labour in China can do it.

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We can make the productive capacity that we need to live the lives that we want

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in our own back yards, and we can do it in a sustainable way.

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We can make machines that we can use to create material abundance for ourselves,

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and then we can show other people how to do it.

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If you have two-hundred people get together

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and if they want to put together a self-sustaining community,

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they don't have many options as far as coming up with the equipment and machines for doing that.

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Thats where Open Source Ecology really comes in.

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The costs of building these machines is about ten percent of what you would buy it for commercially.

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If you take a full blown John Deer tractor,

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it's almost impossible for anyone to go out and try to build one of those for themselves.

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It's a vey custom machine.

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But if you're able to take off-the-shelf engines and

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go down to your hardware store and buy steel and build it yourself, like the Lifetrac,

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then that's much more realistic.

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The benefits of a localised economy are that the power stays within the community.

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Instead of your money, the earnings, going all the way down river,

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what if we can internalise that?

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Keep that wealth in,

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by having all that productive mechanism built in.

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You produce the same, the wealth stays in, you don't have to work so hard.

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Then you can have time for you family and kids, or whatever else is more important to you.

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So its a lot easier and production wise to just have one super compatible module.

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The Powercube right now works with both the Lifetrac and the CEB Press,

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and a few other machines we have, like the Ironworker and the Coldsaw.

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So that provides a much simpler product ecology

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because one power unit serves multiple machines.

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Theres one thing about just being able to look at machines that have been developed on site here,

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and another thing to understand how the development process went through

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and what kind of documentation there is for these machines,

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such that can be replicated and improved on.

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Fortunately we have that ability to have machine information in the digital format,

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and now we have telecom, the Internet, to relay that information and

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have anyone just copy over the files,

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and have access to the model on their computer.

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So Open Source Ecology tries to capture the open source nature of development

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and the fact that we're connected to Nature, to other people, to societal institutions.

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That all has to be considered if we're talking about a paradigm to make a better world.

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Open source was clearly the emerging trend that was so powerful.

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Demonstrated with open source software like the Linux platform.

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When a sufficient number of people come together on a project,

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that project simply becomes better than anything else.

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So we're transitioning that into the hardware space.

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What would happen if people actually collaborated on making open source hardware?

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We have lots of technology out there.

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But to organise the technology in such a way that it's accessible,

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without barriers to people, that is a very significant move forward.

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Now it's there for the individuals to organise themselves,

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and to really dig deeply, almost to what you would say a spiritual level.

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To really change their attitudes, and to take advantage of what is there,

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and to move our civilisation forward.

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I'm hopeful that human kind will arise to the occasion and seize the opportunity offered by this development.

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Open Source Ecology is really about creating the next economy: the open source economy.

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And what does that mean? It's an economy that optimises not only production,

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which the present economy is really good at,

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it's effective in production, but distribution is not so great.

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And how do you do that? And that is by opening...

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so called giving away trade secrets for free,

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or developing open source products for just about anything that we use.

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So imagine a scenario where instead of corporations all competing, reinventing the wheel and so forth,

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a lot of competitive waste, what if everyone were to join together to make the best products,

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the most robust products, that are open source, that anyone has access to producing.

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Then we can run an economy in a collaborative way, instead of a competitive wasteful way.

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A film by
Tristan Copley Smith