Hey Greg - you being the rugged, self-sufficient kind of guy you are - I figured you of all people would likely be particularly interested in this new development:

"Open Source Ecology is a network of farmers, engineers, and supporters that for the last two years has been creating the Global Village Construction Set, an open source, low-cost, high performance technological platform that allows for the easy, DIY fabrication of the 50 different Industrial Machines that it takes to build a sustainable civilization with modern comforts. The GVCS lowers the barriers to entry into farming, building, and manufacturing and can be seen as a life-size lego-like set of modular tools that can create entire economies, whether in rural Missouri, where the project was founded, in urban redevelopment, or in the developing world."

opensourceecology.org/

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Village_Construction_Set

"So far, eight of the fifty machines have been designed, blueprinted, and prototyped. [5][6] On October 2011 a Kickstarter fundraising campaign collected 63,573 USD for project expenses and the construction of a training facility."


Cheers

That's cool. Could also be of great use for salvagers and scavengers. Though it is worth noting that virtually all of their projects require an existing industrial infrastructure to begin with. When they add the tools to make their tools, that will be impressive.

admin wrote:


Definitely - their ultimate goal is to ensure the entire system is self-replicating. Very, very cool.

When I first heard of the project a couple years ago, it seemed too impossible to achieve and I figured it would stall... but it looks like it has actually surpassed somewhat of a critical threshold where it very well might meet the objectives, especially with all that funding and organization. Several years off, no doubt - but still certainly something to keep watching.