Maybe a few of the O’Shaughnessy Ventures grants would best go to recruits rather than applicants? The most famous programs that do things that way are the Nobels and the MacArthur grants, but there are less well-known examples. For instance, my long-time host, former ISS engineer Dani Eder, received several thousand surprise dollars a few years ago from digital certificate pioneer and Ubuntu Linux "benevolent dictator for life" Mark Shuttleworth's foundation, which encouraged Dani to compile a recently completed 18k volume digital archive to restart civilization. (Unfortunately it has no interface other than a Library of Congress directory structure, and sharing it too widely would be risky. It could be a great science and technology dataset for AI training.)
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Dani also invented a relatively practical alternative to the Dyson sphere, massing only about 3x Earth and housing up to 36 quadrillion people; see the "Ederworlds" article at Encyclopedia Galactica. Dani's Seed Factory Project, originally intended to make self-reproducing factories (industrial economies, really) took a great deal of his time and resulted in a sprawling draft on Wikibooks, but I think didn't fulfill its original ambitions.
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I contributed a proposal for how to make seed factories work both micro- and macro- economically, with a growth path from practically manufacturable and salable industrial parts to full self-reproducing "economy in a box" (for sufficiently large values of "box"). I propose widely-distributed micro-business ownership of individual machines, trading use of each others' equipment using internal markets with an internal machine-use backed internal currency, the supply of which expands as the factory produces more machinery for its own use (among other products), machinery which is bought by new affiliates with loans that are repaid in the internal currency. This allows capital income to replace wages and gives a superior alternative to universal basic income schemes. (The germ of the idea came from Robert Anton Wilson's Schrodinger's Cat Trilogy, where a character proposes that factory workers be given loans to buy robots to send in to do the workers' old jobs.)
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My 10-page 2014 proposal addressed several other aspects needed to make the system work, for instance: how to prevent concentration of ownership using insurance and finance contract terms, while still allowing mass production for large entities; how to allow anyone to use the factory system to easily make (nearly) anything; dealing with full product life-cycles through "remanufactories"; and how to painlessly value and compensate contributions so that inventors and designers can make a living without unnecessarily limiting use of information which costs nothing to reproduce.
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I got off track (many such cases) - I nominate Robert A. Nelson of rexresearch.com as the most worthy grant recipient I can think of. For decades he has archived for the world the craziest ideas and maddest of mad scientists as well as revolutionary-but-neglected inventions that really work -- every "big, if true" idea he could find -- without much if any support, indeed living in the desert out of his vehicle for years. Then, in October 2023, a police raid left him without even a vehicle.
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When I contacted him in 2022 with a great "new" invention I found in Nature Scientific Reports, a way to cheaply, easily and permanently disinfect anything (https://substack.com/@enonh/p-148467887), Robert quickly replied with prior art from the 1890's from an extremely obscure source he had archived on his site. That prior art citation stopped any future patent and cut the price by a factor of over 1000, allowing wide use of the product, potentially preventing pandemics and saving innumerable lives.
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I sent Robert more than I could really afford last year when I heard about his loss, but not nearly as much as he deserves or needs. His email is listed on the rexresearch.com main page, as is a paypal link.
Bravo!!
That's an impressive list of fellows so far! Looking forward to see who else hops aboard the OSV ship in 2025!
Maybe a few of the O’Shaughnessy Ventures grants would best go to recruits rather than applicants? The most famous programs that do things that way are the Nobels and the MacArthur grants, but there are less well-known examples. For instance, my long-time host, former ISS engineer Dani Eder, received several thousand surprise dollars a few years ago from digital certificate pioneer and Ubuntu Linux "benevolent dictator for life" Mark Shuttleworth's foundation, which encouraged Dani to compile a recently completed 18k volume digital archive to restart civilization. (Unfortunately it has no interface other than a Library of Congress directory structure, and sharing it too widely would be risky. It could be a great science and technology dataset for AI training.)
-
Dani also invented a relatively practical alternative to the Dyson sphere, massing only about 3x Earth and housing up to 36 quadrillion people; see the "Ederworlds" article at Encyclopedia Galactica. Dani's Seed Factory Project, originally intended to make self-reproducing factories (industrial economies, really) took a great deal of his time and resulted in a sprawling draft on Wikibooks, but I think didn't fulfill its original ambitions.
-
I contributed a proposal for how to make seed factories work both micro- and macro- economically, with a growth path from practically manufacturable and salable industrial parts to full self-reproducing "economy in a box" (for sufficiently large values of "box"). I propose widely-distributed micro-business ownership of individual machines, trading use of each others' equipment using internal markets with an internal machine-use backed internal currency, the supply of which expands as the factory produces more machinery for its own use (among other products), machinery which is bought by new affiliates with loans that are repaid in the internal currency. This allows capital income to replace wages and gives a superior alternative to universal basic income schemes. (The germ of the idea came from Robert Anton Wilson's Schrodinger's Cat Trilogy, where a character proposes that factory workers be given loans to buy robots to send in to do the workers' old jobs.)
-
My 10-page 2014 proposal addressed several other aspects needed to make the system work, for instance: how to prevent concentration of ownership using insurance and finance contract terms, while still allowing mass production for large entities; how to allow anyone to use the factory system to easily make (nearly) anything; dealing with full product life-cycles through "remanufactories"; and how to painlessly value and compensate contributions so that inventors and designers can make a living without unnecessarily limiting use of information which costs nothing to reproduce.
*
I got off track (many such cases) - I nominate Robert A. Nelson of rexresearch.com as the most worthy grant recipient I can think of. For decades he has archived for the world the craziest ideas and maddest of mad scientists as well as revolutionary-but-neglected inventions that really work -- every "big, if true" idea he could find -- without much if any support, indeed living in the desert out of his vehicle for years. Then, in October 2023, a police raid left him without even a vehicle.
-
When I contacted him in 2022 with a great "new" invention I found in Nature Scientific Reports, a way to cheaply, easily and permanently disinfect anything (https://substack.com/@enonh/p-148467887), Robert quickly replied with prior art from the 1890's from an extremely obscure source he had archived on his site. That prior art citation stopped any future patent and cut the price by a factor of over 1000, allowing wide use of the product, potentially preventing pandemics and saving innumerable lives.
-
I sent Robert more than I could really afford last year when I heard about his loss, but not nearly as much as he deserves or needs. His email is listed on the rexresearch.com main page, as is a paypal link.