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The goal is a self-sustaining town geared toward research that lives in a way that does not disturb the natural surroundings of the area. The town will be structured in a way which allows people to spend the majority of their time researching and developing new technologies by focusing most of its resources on community labs and having a general philosophy of “everything is an experiment” from building design and community infrastructure to actual labwork.
We are looking for others that are intelligent, largely self-motivated and hard working who can bring suitable skills to the project in the aim of making it succeed in a self-sufficient manner for generations to come.
We will form the town as a series of private corporations relating to land, individual labs, housing, utilities, agriculture, etc – once the population is large enough to file as an official township we will do so to allow for a sheriff’s station and similar public infrastructure. The land within the confines of the town will be owned by the land holding corporation and shareholders of the parent corporation will be entitled to propose and vote on issues (corporate bylaws, construction projects, resource-intensive communal research projects, etc), live in corporate housing and have food provided so long as they live up to their shareholder agreement and the aforementioned set of dynamic corporate bylaws up for vote.
A large part of the town governance will depend on the desires of the founding members, we are leaning heavily toward a technocratic direct-democracy whereby a private cloud computing system stored in the town’s datacenter will facilitate the organization and direct-representation of shareholders in respect to all the corporate bylaws and other matters relating to the government of the town.
Initially we are looking for 1,000 people that are seeking to help build a self-sustaining town and take advantage of the labs that will be onsite thereafter to pursue scientific research and development of new technologies. The minimum each founder must bring to the project is being set at $15,000 however if any would like to contribute more in support of additional lab equipment, town infrastructure and land acquisition terms of the individual shareholder agreements are negotiable such as minimum square footage of homes for the shareholder, special lab accomodation, the use of the home purely for vacation purposes, etc. Labs will benefit from incorporation as non profit research organizations to facilitate the acquisition of equipment and research materials in the form of donations.
We are looking at having people go in groups. The first group would be the advance party – they would bring the materials to construct relatively low-quality dorms the first day which would be used for incoming parties throughout the construction phase of the project following land acquisition (about the first 5 years). The advance party would consist largely of civil engineers, architects, surveyors, botanists, key planners and others critical to the initial buildout that don’t mind roughing it while getting set up. The task of the advance party will be to build out a partial power plant as a charging station and to drive the construction process, sewage treatment, manufacturing lab, some of the greenhouses, their own homes and to get the farming operations up and running to a suitable level for themselves and the next year’s group. Following the advance party the rest of the project members will move as food, housing and personal schedules allow with preference given to those with the most useful skillsets during the construction phase. Construction techniques will be taught to newcomers as they arrive and we will all have a role in the buildout.
In the initial building phase the members of the town will construct a 10MW solar electric power plant along one of the south-facing slopes of the hilly regions of the town. Given the average sunlight adjusted for cloud cover, latitude and the rate the state’s power distribution company is willing to pay for solar electricity this should yield approximately $900,000 annually after subtracting approximately $3,000,000 every 10 years in maintenance costs for the solar power plant upkeep.
Sunken greenhouses employing compost heaters will be constructed on the southern slopes of hills to provide for year-round farming. Initially it will be a group effort to build the greenhouses, plant the crops and get things running, after which point the botanists in the group will focus largely on that aspect of the town’s development.
Initially an advance party of mostly civil engineers, architects and others critical to the build process will go to the site to break ground and setup the core infrastructure (power plant, sanitation system, a core communal building like the manufacturing lab that will serve as a temporary shelter while the rest of the town is constructed, etc). Once housing is in place for others the next group on the list will come out and help with the construction and the process will continue until completion of the initial build phase. After the initial build phase the civil engineers and geologists will focus on surveying and planning new projects that have been voted on for completion with assistance from those lacking more critical projects whenever needed (for instance in the case of large-scale construction projects the town votes in favor of) but people will largely split off into their specialty positions to make the best advance of their time researching within their fields of expertise.
There are no building codes in the area we are looking to create the town, however we will have civil engineers, architects and others with relevant specialties to ensure that everything is contstructed in an appropriate manner and playing a key role in developing the building codes for the town.
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