From: Patrick Salsbury (salsbury_at_bootstrap.sculptors.com)
Date: 04/13/97
Date: Sun, 13 Apr 1997 10:16:17 -0700 Message-Id: <199704131716.KAA31984@bootstrap.sculptors.com> From: Patrick Salsbury <salsbury_at_bootstrap.sculptors.com> Subject: Re: North Korea & disaster relief
-I'd like to hear more about your ideas for assisting the Third World -
-there is so much knowledge about that if only it could be all put together
-things might start to change.
-
-Here's to planning for a better world ...
-Cath
-
While I was in school, we were designing cardboard dome shelters
(25' diameter) for use in Honduras. They were lightweight (could drop-ship
via airplane), packed small, could be stapled together and erected in 2-4
hours, and were easily mass-producible. Bucky Fuller calculated that *1*
cardboard-stamping machine could produce enough materials to build 3000
houses PER DAY. (The largest housing companies in the world produce perhaps
this many in a year.)
The idea was to provide people with a complete shelter system for
less than US$1000, including a separate domed area for cooking, concrete
pad floor (as opposed to the dirt-floors they currently live in), and a
2.5' riser wall around the base, to keep the cardboard up off the ground
when rains came. (The cardboard would weather just fine for a year or two
with no coatings, and with wax or plastic coating, would last much
longer. Look at milk cartons, holding liquid for weeks without a leak...)
I'd still like to develop this project fully for a disaster relief
program worldwide. The cardboard itself (without the flooring/etc.) would
cost perhaps $150-250/each, probably less in the massive quantities needed
for disasters.
When the earthquake hit Kobe, Japan a couple of years ago, 280,000
homes were destroyed. I bet they're still rebuilding.
Right now, the midwest US is flooded and people have had to
evacuate their homes over the last several months. (This is a perrenial
problem, because people have houses that are anchored to the ground, and
they live on flood-plains.)
One of the ideas for my dream-house is to have it on "stilts" of a
sort. Some kind of tripod, or perhaps 6-legged for stability, and that
these stilts are hydraulic, or pneumatic, so that, should flooding arise,
you can either lift up the house and move it, or jack it 20-30-50' in the
air and wait out the flooding. This kind of stilt-work would also make for
good habitability in lush rainforest areas, where the canopy is so thick
that you can't FIND the ground, much less clear out a space for a
house. With these, you could put legs down through the canopy, and live up
in the sunlight, hanging out in the canopy with all the birds and the
monkeys. :-)
Really, what I'm envisioning is not so much a house, as a prelude
to a spaceship. One that you can "land" anywhere on the planet, and still
remain comfy and cozy at night. Regardless of if you're in and equatorial
rainforest, or on the ice-caps of Antarctica.
This is part of the whole Reality Sculptors project, and I'll be
creating spin-off lists for people who want to work on specific areas of
these projects. (Cardboard domes, power systems, water systems, food, etc.)
--
Pat
___________________Think For Yourself____________________
Patrick G. Salsbury <salsbury_at_sculptors.com>
http://www.sculptors.com/~salsbury/
-----------------------
"Two of the gravest general dangers to survival are the desire for
comfort and a passive outlook." -- U.S. Army Ranger Handbook