This is a further reaction to the presentation of John Robb’s ideas on Resilient Communities that we published in two parts.

What Bryan calls closure engineering is alternative systems that attempt to be self-replicating, but he identifies an important problem: they are many of them, many are abandoned, and their solutions and experiences are most often lost for the next generation.

Bryan Bishop:

“Closure engineering is the wrapping up the supply chain entirely within units that we, as individuals, can help manage and support perhaps in the same traditional style as public service but also with our own intentions for whichever communities decide to spring up – whether on Google Groups or back home in Any Town USA.

There have been many projects that everyone has been starting over and over again, even within the people that we have been bouncing the emails back and forth to here, about this sort of ‘closure’ and ‘backbone’, kind of like a meiosis. Some examples that I can think of off the top of my head include OpenVirgle, OSCOMAK, O’Neill’s space habitats, Eric Hunting‘s work, the Artemis Society, and many others. Each time you see a new colony on a continent here on the earth forming, that’s another example, and the same with group instantiation for new businesses, for new playdate groups, etc. etc. Kevin Kelly called this “civilization as an organism”, with its self-replicating nucleus of the library, although this requires some modification if it’s to actually happen, like the von Neumann Universal Constructor Prize might expect to see happen.

The “nuclear family” used to be like this. The family would have the resources necessary to colonize land and start up life, deploy without much external support except the resources of the land. The concept of a resilient, open, extropic community/family/small-group ‘backbone’ is kind of like those old families, except updated and with emphasis on the technologies used to keep strategies competent and up with the times. You could say that we have to catch up with history just to get back to baseline resilience, sustainability, optimization and so on – it’s not enough to simply start a bank account when you move out of your parent’s house, it’s not enough to leave people’s livelihoods up to whether or not some automation company comes in and manually laboring individuals can’t have food. How is that anywhere near the sort of dedication and certainty of providing basic human essentials for life?

But like I said, we’re all in general agreement on many of these issues, although there have been too many staggard projects before with the space habitat / colonies / “closure” projects that left, leave, or are in the process of leaving too little behind in terms of engineering material to play with.

May I propose a model of working? It’s called boom-and-bust. You run into the problem space, find the people that have left notes and their work behind, do some work of your own, and leave it when you and your team wants. So, when we come back and play archaeologist and try to figure out what went wrong with your project or whatever, we could actually improve the situation. That would be great … this way we have our “fractal”, iterative and recursive approach to working on these projects.”