more with less progress ephemeralization dome, stewart platform, wiki, santa claus machine population growth -> wall have more land? -> colonies space program blundering individual empowerment democratizing innovation Somewhere along the way I realized that humanity can’t keep growing indefinitely on the surface of planet Earth without changing our ways, and perhaps even our selves. Even though technology is about "doing more with less", and advances in ephemeralization will eventually approach doing everything with nothing at all, (or at least a basic kit of free components,) there will be endless hardship and poverty as long as we remain rooted in the archaic mindset of material and intellectual scarcity. Most people think there simply isn’t enough to go around, and perhaps there isn’t, since we use resources so wastefully and lock away the best ideas in journals and patents. But it doesn’t have to be this way. We can show them how to do things better. We can share our innovations and observations, and do it in a way that enables everday people to use them, complete with algorithms to find the shortest path to make something from what is at hand. We can give them a seed, and an idea: tools to make tools to make tools! Where does it all end? Who says it has to end? I can see thriving O’neill colonies in an ever expanding series of orbits throughout the solar system, linked by a highway system of rotating tethers for quick reaction-mass-free passenger transport and beams of neutral plasma for matter exchange, and powered by essentially unlimited solar energy. The challenge is getting from here to there. And here is where I need your help, and you need mine. You see, no university has the research capacity or the focus needed to build an entire spacefaring civilization, and no government mandate exists that will ever be able to fund such an undertaking. But there exist hundreds of thousands of enthusiastic engineers all around the world that would help, if you just gave them a place, a system to cooperate. This system has to start small, and it must work with normal everyday objects in order to gain acceptance among normal everyday people. It has to be fun to use, easy to learn, and come pre-stocked with lots of useful programs and devices. It has to be able to duplicate itself and be modified to overcome problems. It has to transcend patent boundaries, hardware faults, and everyday human bickering. This all points towards a distributed open-source system. I have already started work on such a system, including both the distributed social software, and also the hardware "seed": high performance yet lightweight and compact machine tools. MIT’s FabLab program has achieved an outstanding reputation in the media for encouraging innovation and empowering individuals. But is it really effective on a large scale? The economics simply don’t make sense. Tools that cost tens of thousands of dollars are being used to make items that can be bought or contracted out to job shops for tens of dollars. In order to be an effective agent of change, the FabLabs must eschew expensive proprietary tools and software. The tools are large and heavy, use strange and hard to obtain components for repair and maintenance, and often require extensive training because there is no "foolproofing". Someone will have to "distill" all of these tools down into a minimal kit that can be derived from local sources, in a manner similar to the RepRap project but with a wider range of processes and materials. This is a large undertaking; more than a proof of concept, it must actually work well. You need all the help you can get, whether from highly trained in-house students or from the clamoring hordes of groupies on the net. So here I am, just another guy with a vision, fumbling around and wondering if anyone will take notice.