1 00:00:00,390 --> 00:00:02,567 Tangible problems. 2 00:00:02,567 --> 00:00:05,719 I always felt from as long as I can remember about the power of science, 3 00:00:05,719 --> 00:00:09,242 that it could be used to solve pressing issues, solve problems. 4 00:00:09,242 --> 00:00:12,837 When I studied Chemistry at Princeton it was so theoretical, unapplied. 5 00:00:12,837 --> 00:00:16,055 And I thought oh ok, maybe if I go into physics it will get better. 6 00:00:16,055 --> 00:00:18,882 So I did, and was grossly disappointed. 7 00:00:18,882 --> 00:00:24,222 We were studying wave propagation, and I couldn't understand this one problem, this one equation. 8 00:00:24,222 --> 00:00:28,613 So I went to the professor and I said whats this about, where does this exist? 9 00:00:28,613 --> 00:00:31,733 And he said well it actually doesn't exist, I just made it up. 10 00:00:31,733 --> 00:00:34,996 It's like, oh ok, so that's what we do here. 11 00:00:34,996 --> 00:00:38,981 That was one of those turning points where I said, wow what am I doing here? 12 00:00:38,981 --> 00:00:43,484 In an absolute abundance of resources, power, 13 00:00:43,484 --> 00:00:46,132 human development and culture and everything, 14 00:00:46,132 --> 00:00:51,497 still there's many issues. Mainly the resource conflicts. Poverty, war, depravation. 15 00:00:52,419 --> 00:00:56,212 Survival with the awesome technology that we do have today? 16 00:00:56,212 --> 00:00:59,011 Survival should not take a lot of time. 17 00:00:59,887 --> 00:01:04,722 When you really think about it, all the wealth that we enjoy today for a modern standard of living 18 00:01:04,722 --> 00:01:10,307 relies on rocks, soil, sunlight, plants, water. 19 00:01:10,307 --> 00:01:11,935 Those are all abundant. 20 00:01:11,935 --> 00:01:17,136 Yet the productive mechanism of society is what makes it scarce, artificially so. 21 00:01:17,136 --> 00:01:23,304 What if we could survive and thrive up to a modern standard of living, 22 00:01:23,304 --> 00:01:28,286 and not only that, at two hours a day of work, and from local resources. 23 00:01:28,286 --> 00:01:29,942 How would that be? 24 00:01:29,942 --> 00:01:33,296 The most important part of Open Source Ecology is this idea that 25 00:01:33,296 --> 00:01:36,793 with a small amount of resources and a small amount of money, 26 00:01:36,793 --> 00:01:42,193 anybody should be able to create a high standard of living for themselves, 27 00:01:42,193 --> 00:01:46,211 and do it in a way that doesn't require a whole lot of time, a whole lot of money. 28 00:01:46,211 --> 00:01:50,116 People can actually be empowered but he technology we're creating here, 29 00:01:50,116 --> 00:01:54,487 so rather than a big corporation deciding what machines can do for us, 30 00:01:54,487 --> 00:01:58,269 we can decide how we want machines to work for us. 31 00:01:58,269 --> 00:02:01,981 Instead of relying on other people to make things that we need, 32 00:02:01,981 --> 00:02:04,546 we can make everything that we need for ourselves. 33 00:02:04,546 --> 00:02:07,220 And we can do it better than Walmart can do it, 34 00:02:07,220 --> 00:02:10,972 we can do it better than slave labour in China can do it. 35 00:02:10,972 --> 00:02:15,318 We can make the productive capacity that we need to live the lives that we want 36 00:02:15,318 --> 00:02:19,103 in our own back yards, and we can do it in a sustainable way. 37 00:02:19,103 --> 00:02:22,974 We can make machines that we can use to create material abundance for ourselves, 38 00:02:22,974 --> 00:02:26,121 and then we can show other people how to do it. 39 00:02:27,120 --> 00:02:29,195 If you have two-hundred people get together 40 00:02:29,195 --> 00:02:32,184 and if they want to put together a self-sustaining community, 41 00:02:32,184 --> 00:02:38,116 they don't have many options as far as coming up with the equipment and machines for doing that. 42 00:02:38,116 --> 00:02:41,768 That's where Open Source Ecology really comes in. 43 00:02:41,768 --> 00:02:47,861 The costs of building these machines is about ten percent of what you would buy it for commercially. 44 00:02:47,861 --> 00:02:51,163 If you take a full blown John Deer tractor, 45 00:02:51,163 --> 00:02:55,313 it's almost impossible for anyone to go out and try to build one of those for themselves. 46 00:02:55,313 --> 00:02:57,712 I mean that's just a very custom machine. 47 00:02:57,712 --> 00:03:02,387 But if you're able to take off-the-shelf engines and 48 00:03:02,387 --> 00:03:07,252 go down to your hardware store and buy steel and build it yourself, like the Lifetrac, 49 00:03:07,252 --> 00:03:10,057 then that's much more realistic. 50 00:03:10,057 --> 00:03:11,929 The benefits of a localized economy are that 51 00:03:11,929 --> 00:03:14,361 the power stays within the community, the economic wealth. 52 00:03:14,361 --> 00:03:18,778 Instead of your money, the earnings, going all the way down the river, 53 00:03:18,778 --> 00:03:20,834 what if we can internalise that? 54 00:03:20,834 --> 00:03:22,015 Keep that wealth in, 55 00:03:22,015 --> 00:03:24,859 by having all that productive mechanism built in. 56 00:03:24,859 --> 00:03:28,508 You produce the same, the wealth stays in, you don't have to work so hard. 57 00:03:28,508 --> 00:03:33,231 Then you can have time for you family and kids, or whatever else is more important to you. 58 00:03:35,167 --> 00:03:43,220 So its a lot easier and production wise to just have one super compatible module. 59 00:03:43,220 --> 00:03:47,616 The Powercube right now works with both the Lifetrac and the CEB Press, 60 00:03:47,616 --> 00:03:51,576 and a few other machines we have, like the Ironworker and the Coldsaw. 61 00:03:51,576 --> 00:03:57,612 So that provides a much simpler product ecology 62 00:03:57,612 --> 00:04:01,851 because one power unit serves multiple machines. 63 00:04:01,851 --> 00:04:07,514 There is one thing about just being able to look at machines that have been developed on site here, 64 00:04:07,514 --> 00:04:12,713 and another thing to understand how the development process went through and 65 00:04:12,713 --> 00:04:15,777 what kind of documentation there is for these machines, 66 00:04:15,777 --> 00:04:19,109 such that can be replicated and improved on. 67 00:04:19,109 --> 00:04:25,593 Fortunately we have that ability to have machine information in the digital format, 68 00:04:25,593 --> 00:04:29,982 and now we have telecom, the Internet, to relay that information and 69 00:04:29,982 --> 00:04:33,056 have anyone just copy over the files, 70 00:04:33,056 --> 00:04:36,782 and have access to the model on their computer. 71 00:04:36,782 --> 00:04:39,947 So Open Source Ecology tries to capture the open source nature of development and the fact 72 00:04:39,947 --> 00:04:45,091 that we're connected to Nature, to other people, to societal institutions. 73 00:04:45,091 --> 00:04:49,298 That all has to be considered if we're talking about a paradigm to make a better world. 74 00:04:49,298 --> 00:04:56,262 Open source was clearly the emerging trend that was so powerful. 75 00:04:56,262 --> 00:05:00,170 Demonstrated with open source software like the Linux platform. 76 00:05:00,170 --> 00:05:02,809 When a sufficient number of people come together on a project, 77 00:05:02,809 --> 00:05:05,303 that project simply becomes better than anything else. 78 00:05:05,303 --> 00:05:08,821 So we're transitioning that into the hardware space. 79 00:05:08,821 --> 00:05:13,063 What would happen if people actually collaborated on making open source hardware? 80 00:05:13,063 --> 00:05:15,514 We have lots of technology out there. 81 00:05:15,514 --> 00:05:19,331 But to organise the technology in such a way that it's accessible, 82 00:05:19,331 --> 00:05:23,736 without barriers to people, that is a very significant move forward. 83 00:05:23,736 --> 00:05:28,636 Now it's there for the individuals to organise themselves, 84 00:05:28,636 --> 00:05:34,523 and to really dig deeply, almost to what you would say a spiritual level. 85 00:05:34,523 --> 00:05:39,331 To really change their attitudes, and to take advantage of what is there, 86 00:05:39,331 --> 00:05:43,116 and to move our civilisation forward. 87 00:05:43,116 --> 00:05:47,002 I'm hopeful that human kind will arise to the occasion and 88 00:05:47,002 --> 00:05:51,119 seize the opportunity offered by this development. 89 00:05:51,119 --> 00:05:56,607 Open Source Ecology is really about creating the next economy: the open source economy. 90 00:05:56,607 --> 00:06:01,674 And what does that mean? It's an economy that optimises not only production, 91 00:06:01,674 --> 00:06:04,312 which the present economy is really good at, 92 00:06:04,312 --> 00:06:07,609 it's effective in production, but distribution is not so great. 93 00:06:07,609 --> 00:06:10,939 And how do you do that? And that is by opening... 94 00:06:10,939 --> 00:06:15,031 so called giving away trade secrets for free, or 95 00:06:15,031 --> 00:06:19,183 developing open source products for just about anything that we use. 96 00:06:19,183 --> 00:06:24,680 So imagine a scenario where instead of corporations all competing, reinventing the wheel and so forth, 97 00:06:24,680 --> 00:06:29,768 a lot of competitive waste, what if everyone were to join together to make the best products, 98 00:06:29,768 --> 00:06:33,421 the most robust products, that are open source, that anyone has access to producing them. 99 00:06:33,421 --> 00:06:35,822 And therefore we can run an economy in a collaborative way, 100 00:06:35,822 --> 00:06:39,109 as opposed to a competitive wasteful way. 101 00:06:45,156 --> 00:06:49,427 A film by Tristan Copley Smith