Back to the Longest Night Festival
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Participants
- Brandon CS Sanders ... convener
- Arthur Brock ... convener
- Shelley Schoepflin Sanders
- Mickki Langston
- Ben Sibelman
- Keith Lofstrom
- Judy Sibelman
- Steve Sibelman
Synopsis
- What businesses can we incubate that would connect us with Earth and community and point us toward TheDestiny?
- Arthur Brock: What community models can we incubate (ways of relating and connecting)?
Discussion
Village as Space Business Incubator
- Principle: Small business useful on Earth that can be bootstrapped toward work useful in space travel/colonization
- Ideas for businesses
- Brandon: Water desalination and recycling
- Humanitarian as well as profitable
- Mickki: Food production in community gardens
- Make it less dependent on petroleum
- Time and knowledge/skills for growing more food closer to home
- Keith: Device for "farmer dummies" to tell them what the soil condition is and what to do with it?
- Not just about generating money, also providing for our own food needs
- Also, selling food locally can connect us with other nearby communities
- Keith: "Roof (information) bank" business for farming on rooftops
- Develop innovations for ex. working on steeper roofs
- Training and tools to work safely on roofs
- Survey of roofs in the city to find the best buildings to approach first
- Connect people who own/operate buildings but don't want to farm themselves, with people who want to farm their roofs
- What does it mean to be a good incubator?
- Steve: For both businesses more closely aimed at TheDestiny and those that are "crassly utilitarian" moneymakers, and a range in between
- Some people can keep doing what they're doing as far as generating money, freeing others for working toward the mission in less profitable ways
- Art: Money isn't the only type of resource we can generate
- Brandon: Time is the scarcest resource, and I'm spending too much of my time grubbing for money
- Keith: Better to take time away from "relaxing" activities like watching TV, to do actually more relaxing things like gardening
- Ben: Provide more story in people's lives (to replace TV)
- Art: Being part of a story shapes the trajectory of people's lives; TV-watching fits into a story about "work during the day, then relax at night"
- Keith: Learn other people's stories by being more social (and overcoming fear of others)
- Brandon: My life is part of an epic story described by TheDestiny
- Art: Does this story help create the common thread of purpose for a community in the present that is worth living in?
- Or is it an "ends justify the means" idea?
- Steve: A story with more immediate payoff may be necessary (though without tearing down the story of TheDestiny)
- Keith: The Path Between the Seas: George Stevens said "We're not building the Panama Canal, we're building a community that builds a canal"
- Started by spending 5 years getting rid of malaria and building Midwest-suburb-style settlements
- Judy: Can we find a similar nonintuitive roadblock to building a starship and remove it?
- Keith: People feel they need the whole world's support to embark on a world-changing effort
- Steve: What about a story that helps us transition away from an energy-intensive society based on a non-sustainable resource (oil)?
- Keith: The numbers don't support a "back-to-the-land" story for this
- Ben: But this story is already working to create communities in the Transition Towns movement