I was thinking about this a litle bit. If we are enabling bootstrapping, shouldn’t we do it in such a way where all the materials are easily acceesible to people?
I haven’t fully thought this out, but could one way to self sufficiency be through organic chemistry and plastics engineering? Likw think about it. Plastics can be made in a variety of ways and styles, woth different properties, not to mention they can easily be formed from carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, etc, all of which are very easily accessible. I can acknowledge that there are a lot of risks, such as filtering out dangerous plastics or minimizing their use, as well as addressing plastic pollution, but if we can do it in the right way, we could have a viabke path towards common people/bootstrapped l collectives being able to make their own stuff cheaply.
Please corect me if I am wrong, and thank you for reading!
Hmmm, thanks for bringing up those points and clarifying it for me. Hopefully research will pan out ways to make these functional groups efficiently, but as of now we have yet to see. Maybe in the future we could take advantage of genetic engineering and bacteria to produce the groups we need from the raw components…
well micro-fabricators might enable such processes, not all plastics would be a benefit to create. So perhaps a good first step is determining what things would benefit most from plastics and what plastic properties would be needed. That way we would only spend energy of determining the processes for plastics that would actually be beneficial to society.