2013 Robert Steele: $500 Million to Resettle 1 Million on a Moonscape with Sun, Dirt, & Salt Water….Exploring the Practical Edge of Intelligence with Integrity — 2.0 Habitat Cost Sheet Posted

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OUR OBJECTIVE: Figure out how to take one million people out of a virtual hell and resettle them into a virtual heaven, using only $500 million ($500 per person), and three ingredients available in plentitude: sunlight, barren earth, and salt water. Begin within 90 days and finish within two years. In so doing, create the playbook for addressing the needs of the two billion extreme poor so as to end the migration pressures on Australia, Europe, Russia, Turkey, and the USA.*

SHORT URL: http://tinyurl.com/500-Civilization

* Three hard things in one package: # of people, fixed low-cost per person, and zero base start — in the middle of a moonscape with no supporting foundation. This is about speed & scale combined, and open source and low cost per person plus assured sustainability combined. A non-trivial challenge no one else has addressed.

INTRODUCTION:

Both human understanding and critical technologies have advanced far beyond the understanding of most academics, civil organizations including labor unions and religions, corporations, governments, law enforcement, media, the military, and non-government/non-profit organizations.

Hybrid public governance rooted in open-source decision-support — legal ethical evidence-based decision-support — is the wave of the future that we must all ride if we are to prosper.

My email is robert.david.steele.vivas [at] gmail [dot] com. I seek to attract ideas from those who believe, as I do, that there is plenty of money to create a prosperous world at peace — we simply lack applied intelligence with integrity across all traditional organizations. There are new leaders in place who appear disposed to listen. The time for Alternative C2, Open Source Everything (technical), and M4IS2 (human factor) has arrived.

Three big things have changed:

01 Unilateral top-down command & control is being replaced by hybrid multinational bottom-up consensus (M4IS2). Network enabled capabilities (NEC) are now predominantly about human trust rather than about trusted technology (most of which has been fraudulent to begin with).

02 Proprietary C4ISR technologies controlled by the government and military are being replaced by Alternative C2 that leverages what everyone else already has. Humanitarian technologies have displaced secret technologies — they are more useful, more cost-effective, and more trustworthy.

03 Financial terrorism and predatory capitalism are being replaced by Open Source Everything (OSE) as a technical enabler for wealth creation.

Irrespective of competing financial and political interests, it is now possible to create self-sustaining villages where life has been virtually impossible. As long as one can marshal sunlight, dirt, and salt water, all free of charge, it is possible to thrive with ample supplies of clean water and hydroponically-grown food, while achieving — at the village level — prosperity and peace.

Pumping stations powered by solar energy will enable the sea-based water desalination stations to refill aquifers and service inland needs. Are you ready for the end of poverty, the end of disease, and the end of fear?

UNDER CONSTRUCTION PENDING VARIOUS INPUTS FROM VENDORS ETC.

The US Government also appears to be totally incapacitated when it comes to dealing with “friendly enemies” — not just its European arch-rivals, the France, Germany, Russia, and the United Kingdom — but its puported strategic allies in the Middle East and North Africa, notably Israel, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey, each in its own way a considerable counterintelligence and strategic analytic challenge. Add to that the problems or our own making — we all knew years ago that the US “system” was embarked on a campaign to take down seven countries in five years (General Wesley Clark, YouTube 2:13). Today we have what I have called the “swath of destruction” doing down toward Mali, Niger, and Nigeria (the latter two rich in oil) while we also ignore the Caribbean and the Americas both south and far north, all ready for major leaps forward. Instead of a pivot to Asia, we should be healing the Americas and lifting up Africa. We also have the persistent migration of displaced person toward Australia, Europe, Russia, Turkey, and the USA, combined with rapidly increasing poverty across the “first world.”

I cannot specify a single country here and now, but there are many countries that would benefit from an intervention by a global network of countries, corporations, civil societies, and other forms of collaborator, that seeks to create multiple self-sustaining village from scratch, which is to say, in isolated areas that have nothing to offer except sunlight, dirt, and salt water. In my view, the aquifer situation is getting so desperate, including within the USA, that the next major demographic move is going to be “to the sea.” The combination of solar power, water desalination, free cellular, and hydroponic agriculture is going to change everything. It might even stop civil wars and predatory capitalism including financial terrorism.

For my purposes I am setting 100,000 as the size of the village, with an average household size of 5, hence 25,000 households, each further broken down into enclaves of 5,000 households, and these in turn into neighborhoods of 500 households each. At a lower level of planning I am also doing a village of 100 — 20 households. My intent is to use this as a case study in how the EU and NATO might come together with the BRICS and the regional associations to do two things, one non-kinetic, the other kinetic.

Thing One: Create an Open Source Everything (OSE) local to global collaboration, communications, computing, and consensus (C4) information-sharing and sense-making (IS2) that is MULTINATIONAL in every respect–instead of C4ISR, we must focus on Multinational, Multiagency, Multidisciplinary, Multidomain Information-Sharing and Sense-Making (M4IS2). Of course C4ISR will remain vital for unilateral and coalition operations with focused objectives, but at the strategic level, where long-term outcomes must be devised, we are now at a point of no return. Embrace the BRICS and the regionals, or die.

Thing Two: The Cold War industrial complex has gone as far as it can go on debt. When I speak of debt I do not just refer to financial debt, but to natural capital debt. The West has looted the world in a most irresponsible manner. No worries on that one, we were ignorant.

What does trouble me is that we continue to spend over $1.2 trillion dollars a year on an antiquated, overly complex and terribly irrelevant war machine, when one third of what we spend on war could create a prosperous world at peace. In my view, the time has come for the BRICS to demand, and the EU and NATO to acknowledge, that the acme of skill in local to global relations is to create a prosperous world at peace, a world that works for all — to create what one author calls a Non-Zero world (see also Holistic Darwinism). Morally and intellectually and financially, this is immdiately do-able. The obstacles are individual and institutional and can be summed up in one word: corruption. The self-sustaining village — civilization in a box — is what Open Source Ecology and clever hydroponics as defined by SunDrop Farms, make possible. More on that later but here is the central challenge slide as adapted from SunDrop Farms' own website:

This post is my attempt to develop a narrative — an illustrated narrative — that draws on the collective wisdom of every possible contributor I can engage. What had captured my attention early on is the fact that no one has done this before, and a handbook for doing it does not exist. If you talk to major international organizations, or major civil affairs or assistance elements, they know how to create pieces (e.g. set up water desalination producing 100,000 gallons a day, but they do not have an end to end menu. This handbook — and the OSE/M4IS2 network that it might inspire — is in my view a Nobel objective.

I am including the USA because I consider the USA to be a failed state at a meta-level, and I believe that if the federal government continues on its present course, every state — every one of the 50 states — is going to have to stop paying federal taxes and pursue its own resilience strategies. The preconditions of revolution that exist in the USA are to me — one of the few who actually obsesses on this topic — shocking. Poverty has doubled in the USA in the last 12 years; 1 in 4 children is going to bed hungry; the actual unemployment rate is 22.4% generally, and among recent graduates and those over 60 who want to work, closer to 40%.

Here is an outline of how I am breaking the problem down, distinguishing between refugees who need to be repatriated, and displaced people or people impoverished in place who need to be lifted up. In both cases, the legacy system is too broken to repair. We need a completely new approach, and certainly one that plans 100 years into the future and takes into account rising seas and their impact on existing land masses.

01 Where are the people to be accommodated, what is their state, to include the specifics of their tribes and clans and point of origin as well as past skills, and what do they want? It turns out that all the refugee registration plans do not ask these questions. There are organizations that specialize in surveying populations that can ask these questions, but refugee camps are not places they have been hired to visit. Another factor — one the West is very ill-equipped to define or understand, is the degree to which these refugee populations have been radicalized, penetrated, or otherwise incentivized toward supporting fundamentalist and/or criminal networks. I believe the West worries too much about this point — the goal should be to create a prosperous world at peace, one in which there are few incentives for violence, not to prescreen people for trouble-makers while failing to actually offer them. We have no business preventing the spread of whatever religion a population chooses to accommodate, provided no religion seeks to interfere with our own governance — what the Catholics and Jews and Pentecostals do within US local to federal governments would be treason in a properly managed Islamic country; it may be time we take a page from their Standard Operating Procedures (SOP) and flush our secular government of religious traitors. My preference is to screen for family, clan, tribe and preferred return destination, and leave the politics and religion to the receiving government and its religious advisers.

02 How fast can we stand up water desalination with its own solar power, add free cellular for everyone age 10 or above, and provide a self-sustaining mix of hydroponic plants, hydroponic fish, and water-refreshed pastoral food? This can be divided into two categories: smaller self-contained solar-water desalination capabilities suitable for 100 families — these are used to take care of the “scouts” or advance party from the refugee camps and/or the temporary staff brought in to alleviate extreme deprivation in any location — and permanent capabilities at varying levels of sophistication. There are some superb offerings that are containerized and can be used temporarily or permanently, but solar power fields have to be arranged separately.

03 What mix of temporary medical, security, scholastic, labor organization, and religious ministry capabilities are required pending the construction and staffing of permanent facilities, are needed? I have learned this can be a very severe requirement, particularly when hundreds of thousands of refugees are being repatriated after having been denied all health care services for up to a year if not longer. It would appear that at least six months if not a full twelve months of direct support from temporary facilities and temporary non-nationals is required. On medical, I have enormous regard for Medecins Sans Frontiers (Doctors without Borders) but I also believe that all military medical and dental reserve units — including all hospital ships — should be spending 30 days a year deployed domestically or internationally.

04 How quickly can we validate the suitability of local dirt (free) mixed with salt water (plentiful) as the primary ingredient for single story homes and places of business both public and private? How many brick presses are needed to put everyone under roof within 90 days? Open Source Ecology has half the solution — housing is the financial deal breaker for most communities — while SunDrop Farms has the other half — clean water is the foundation for sustaining any community.

05 For any given culture and environment, what is the planning number for public services for 100,000 people? How many mosques or churches or temples, how many hospitals and clinics, how many universities and schools, how many police stations and prison cells, how many government offices at what levels for what functions? What I am finding is that all the concepts and doctrine are completely out of date if not completely lost. This really does appear to be a clean sheet problem.

06 What is the cost per person to move them from being poor or in refugee status, to being prosperous, healthy, and at peace? Right now my number is $500 per person. This week I am approaching White SOF and NATO Civil Affairs as well as the EU and UN, seeking existing numbers, but what I expect to find is that no one has ever done this before — combined the best available new open source technologies with the best available new solar and water and hydroponics and cellular technologies.,

07 Who should fund this? Is this something that should be pitched to billionaires, individuals, or everyone? $10 for each of 100 million people is a billion dollars. This is not something Kickstarter can handle, they tend to reject really big ideas.

HERE IS MY ROUGH COST SHEET FOR THE HABITAT PORTION, with the observation that it adds up to US$279.33M and that my rough calculations for a specific country I cannot specify at this time include US$168.99M for public services and US$51.68M for air, sea, and ground transport, or a total of US$500M. This does not include the construction of airports or seaports. It does include a self-sustaining economy that within two years will begin creating a surplus of produce, fish, and pastoral products suitable for export.

BELOW ARE A SELECTION OF OFFERINGS (WITH COUNTRY CODES):
Solar Power, Desalination, Open Source Tools, Cellular, Housing, and Sanitation.

01 SOLAR POWER (Community, Institutional, Residential)

CN: SunTech Power

JP: Sharp Solar

KR: Hanwha SolarOne

NO: Renewable Energy Corporation

US: First Solar

US: SunPower

02 WATER DESALINATION

ES: Abengoa, Acciona Energy

FR: Degremont

FR: Veolia Water