Starting Humanity 2.0 - How many tools does it take to start a self-sustaining human colony? Turns out the answer is 50. Interestingly enough, the people who figured it out aren’t even looking at space colonization, but are advocates of open source ecology. They designed what they call the Global Village Construction Set, and the claim is that with these 50 tools and local resources (water, energy, plants, soil) you can build a civilization from scratch.
Granted it won’t start out loaded with all the creature comforts we’re used to in developed nations, and neither will it have the glossy high-tech look of the typical vision of humanity’s first space settlement, but then again it doesn’t have the billion dollar price tag either. If space truly does become the next frontier of human settlement, the people who cross it to start over on an alien world are likely to have more in common with the early settlers of the American west than today’s astronauts.
Getting there is the hard part, and potential settlers are likely going to spend most of the resources on achieving that journey, leaving them with a tight budget once they arrive. In that context, the Global Village Construction Set is a great pathfinder for starting a new world.
(Source: ted.com)
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