[Hplusroadmap] Fwd: Re: [wta-talk] Culture of h+ support and compassion

[Bryan Bishop]

----------  Forwarded Message  ----------

Subject: Re: [wta-talk] Culture of h+ support and compassion
Date: Wednesday 12 December 2007
From: Bryan Bishop <kanzure at gmail.com>
To: World Transhumanist Association Discussion List 
<wta-talk at transhumanism.org>

On Wednesday 12 December 2007, Thomas McCabe wrote:
> A quick Craigslist check shows that renting a 1BR apartment in the
> Bay Area costs $7000/year+ in rent, plus utilities, etc. According to

"Strategic location" might mean picking something just on the outskirts 
of the city. Downtown anywhere you're going to be paying a lot. But if 
you're close enough to a major highway or something, you're quickly 
able to get to most of the important places.

> the fundraising numbers posted a few weeks back, in 2006, that was
> just about the entire annual budget of the WTA. We expect to do

The WTA would not be able to fund the operation. It might be possible to 
turn it into an income generator. 

> better this year, but that's still a lot of money, even forgetting
> about the need for staff and the cost for a conventional 'office'
> space. The question is worth asking twice: what would we *do* with
> such a facility? Beware of nice romantic ideas that don't actually
> help anybody.

R&D is most always expensive, and that's why many companies (even those 
with millions) don't bother. However, I think there might be a 
worthwhile strategy to pursue if we take after the likes of 
Sourceforge, grassroot action groups, etc. 

The idea would be to support small groups/teams of individuals. They 
would be granted access to the facilities for whatever they need, and 
they could bring in more tools to do whatever it is they need. The 
facility will cost, maybe by the hour, but that doesn't matter too 
much. What's important is that as the number of teams increases, you 
maximize entropy and you maximize the number of different perspectives 
that various individuals are suggesting to potential investors. 

What's to say this would stay "strictly transhumanist" ? Ideally we 
would have a quick review board or group that would oversee applicants 
that want to use the facilities, and we would approve/deny various 
projects. 

The plus of all of this is that we would be able to consolidate 
materials and tools at a single location. Hopefully, we would have good 
relations with those that use the tools, so if they ever start up a 
business or bigger group, they would help contribute to the expansion 
of the "tool consolidation" project. Maybe expand to two locations at 
one point.

The big problem with this plan is that the tools required to pursue 
transhumanist projects - brain implants, rockets, molecular biology 
stuffs (tech like a DNA sequencer), fabricators, semiconductor 
fabbers - is really, really expensive, and might require some special 
seed capital. But after it's all set up, we can leave the hand-waving 
to smarter groups than us. Such is the nature of open source.

> And before anyone says that we'll just have to raise more money,
> remember that the National Space Society had a total budget of ~$1M
> last year, and they have tens of thousands of paying members. So far
> as I know, they have no physical HQ either.

That's strange. I would hope that the NSS would try to promote space 
dev. Have a few rocket launching sites, even for amateurs. A few lathes 
laying around in a garage to call "HQ". Etc.

- Bryan

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