As a species, we have had the technological capability to feed, clothe, house, and educate everyone on the planet since the 1850’s.
It hasn’t been done so far, so we’re creating a tool-set that will allow this to happen.
It will allow anyone to boot-strap themselves into a sustainable lifestyle that won’t damage the planet’s biological infrastructure that we need to survive.
We’re making the tools to make the tools that we need to thrive.
Rationale for Open Source Hardware Infrastructure
This weekend someone asked me what i really want to do.
I thought for a while and had to say that i’d get back to her with a fuller reply.
This is the start of my thoughts on what i’m trying to accomplish.
Before you read the rest of this, please watch this youtube video first
While it shows some rather elegant extensions of the Mandelbrot set equations, it can be interpreted on a number of levels.
One interpretation is that of using nano-technological, fractal construction techniques to construct a lifeship that would be used for interstellar travel.
It is a way of making things that has already been tested in the laboratory, and is a logical extension of current strands of research.
It’s getting the price-point of the energy-cost down to feasible levels that will require a lot of work, as well as creating a society that will be capable of maintaining the energy-surplus necessary to sustain the upkeep for this technology.
Building this will require a stable and equitable society on a planetary scale.
So we’ve got a lot of work to do. 
To create an equitable society necessary to get to this point, we need to make the technology available so that the lower levels of Maslow’s hierarchy are fulfilled for everyone.
We need to stabilise the planetary food supplies, solve the energy generation/distribution bottlenecks, improve communications, housing, education on a planetary scale and transition ourselves from a scarcity-based economic system to an abundance-based system. And then we’ll be able to seriously start exploring off-planet.
There are solutions that already exist to all of these problems. Not “new-and-shiny” vapour-ware requiring unobtainium to be discovered, but solutions that already exist.
Let’s set about implementing them.
(Note: Original date is 2014-09-22. It’s shown differently due to a software bug after migrating this post. – @matthias)