TED Video. Made of a mix of proteins, spider silks come in thousands of variations; there are over 40,000 species of spiders, with many spiders capable of producing half a dozen types.
Inspiring! When the residents of Saranac Lake, NY were faced with having a Super Wal-Mart put in, some 600 residents came together to open their own department store.
Using wikis and digital fabrication tools, TED Fellow Marcin Jakubowski
is open-sourcing the blueprints for 50 farm machines, allowing anyone to
build their own tractor or harvester from scratch. And that's only the
first step in a project to write an instruction set for an entire
self-sustaining village (starting cost: $10,000).
Declaring that, "We can lead self-sustaining lives without
sacrificing our standard of living," Marcin Jakubowski believes that
only by opening the means of production can we achieve abundance for
all. Though he has a Ph.D. in fusion physics, he became dissatisfied
with its remoteness, and turned back to the earth as a farmer and social
innovator.
He is the founder of Open Source Ecology,
which is creating the Global Village Construction Set — the blueprints
for simple fabrication of everything needed to start a self-sustaining
village. At Factor e Farm in rural Missouri, he's been successfully
putting those ideas to the test. www.opensourceecology.org.nyud.net
"It's not reinventing the wheel; it's open-sourcing the wheel."
TED Video. Made of a mix of proteins, spider silks come in thousands of variations; there are over 40,000 species of spiders, with many spiders capable of producing half a dozen types.
Inspiring! When the residents of Saranac Lake, NY were faced with having a Super Wal-Mart put in, some 600 residents came together to open their own department store.
