The civilization bootstrap.
If you're still watching, we may have moved past casual curiosity. So let me show you my biggest project: Singular City, a real-life MMORPG.
Not through charity. Not through a lottery. Not by hoping the right opportunities appear. By designing the opportunities into the system itself.
Growing up is the most detached from our natural interface we've ever been: complexity, polarization and sexy distractions make it harder for young people to become fully functional adults. A century ago choosing a career meant choosing a profession. Today it means choosing whether to work on machines, genes, intelligence, quantum information, other planets, or reality itself.
What if human development had the clarity of a well-designed game?
Gamification, not to make life trivial. To make progress visible.
Fundamentals & safety
Electrical basics.
Assemble
A small solar installation; learn to maintain it.
Repair
Help fix an actual system.
Design
Participate in designing a more advanced one.
Lead · launch · teach
Lead a team, start a business, teach the next group.
Real skills. Real projects. Real economic value. You can afford to stay at Singular City from day one with the credits you earn by completing quests. You can see where you are, what you've accomplished, and the next step.
Built in stages, not all at once.
Singular City connects the manufacturing platform from Stage 2 with the Universal Prosperity concept from Stage 3. And I have a very unconventional idea for how to begin: the replicator path starts with a paper: a preregistration protocol. Everything else starts with a movie.
Manufacturing Function, Not Only Form: a preregistration protocol for the four tests. Could be transcendental.
Foretell the founding of Singular City.
An experimental campus with the accessibility of a theme park. People hang out, try the technologies, learn skills, run quests, and expose everything that doesn't work.
Test the components with real people, real costs, real constraints. Improve. Test again. If mall betas succeed, scaling to actual communities is easy.
Manifesters and print bays: the stage-2 machine, in public
Solar, batteries, microgrid; the first talent tree
Level 0 onboarding, talent trees, quest board
Food, water and biology quests
The first public Manifester, running all day
Get your Level 0 badge; meals paid in quest credits
The parking lot powers the building
How much civilization can you bootstrap from a limited set of tools, materials and people?
A civilization on Mars cannot depend forever on shipments from Earth. Local manufacturing, local energy, local food, local everything, and people capable of continuously improving all of them. The remote-Earth and Mars problems are not identical, but they share that question. It's worth dedicating a life to.
Computing with matter, closed loop.
Today we translate problems into information, process it electronically, and use the result. But matter itself can perform useful operations. What if we programmed more of those processes directly, and connected that to a machine that manufactures the structures which execute them? Then we're no longer printing objects. We're programming physical behavior.
If I'm wrong, I've lost twenty years and you've lost sixty minutes. If we're right, this may be the moment our universe flipped the coin and won.