[Paperweight]

I love this! Is there a larger technologist wiki from which you can learn the principles of how to actually build everything from raw materials and generic tools?

Examples: casting iron, making blades, making paint, making plastics, making printer ink, making pharmaceuticals that actually work, etc.

It really seems that at this stage in the game we should be able to form "off-grid" villages that actually have a pretty good standard of living. Or is that all forbidden knowledge in this stage of our technological enslavation? ;)

[habitue]

There is a book called "How to Invent Everything, A Survival Guide for the Stranded Time Traveller"

https://www.howtoinventeverything.com/

[amelius]

There's also: "The Knowledge: How to Rebuild Civilization in the Aftermath of a Cataclysm"

https://www.amazon.com/Knowledge-Rebuild-Civilization-Afterm...

[bredren]

It this like the popular 90s illustrated The Way Things work with a sci-fi angle?

[emmanueloga_]

The author of "The tangled Web" [1] also has two pages on how to resin cast gears [2] and basics of electronics [3].

I really admire this kind of mother day "renaissance man" :-)

1: https://lcamtuf.coredump.cx/tangled/

2: https://lcamtuf.coredump.cx/gcnc/

3: https://lcamtuf.coredump.cx/electronics/

[emmanueloga_]

errr... "modern day" :-p

btw first time I notice you cannot edit your posts past certain time, apparently?

[Reelin]

> "off-grid" villages that actually have a pretty good standard of living

Sure, if you consider 1920s era technology to be a reasonable standard of living. Or I suppose you could cheat and import a computer or two? Not sure how you're going to fabricate high performance solar panels on your own though.

I don't know about a single Wiki but casting metal, making blades, and various pigments (so paints and inks) should be readily doable at home and the information readily accessible. Some end products have significant barriers in terms of equipment and skill though, so pick carefully.

Making plastic products might be quite involved and require specialized equipment depending on your desired starting point and polymer. (At the other extreme, 3D printing objects from purchased filament is easy but seems like it defeats the described purpose.)

A number of basic pharmaceuticals (opiates, aspirin, a few others I don't remember off the top of my head) can be readily manufactured at home if you have a garden and don't mind committing multiple felony offenses in the process. Most chemical synthesis is quite involved though and pharmaceuticals in particular tend to consist of difficult to work with organic molecules.

Pharmaceuticals and plastics are both pushing into the realm of organic chemistry which isn't very accessible without significant time spent studying. Unfortunately chemistry outside of a company or research institution has also been more or less criminalized at this point across most of the world. The vast majority of basic reagents will be classed as precursors to either illegal drugs or explosives. (Yay freedom!)

[marcosdumay]

Iron, blades, paint, plastic, ink, and specially pharmaceuticals are generic names for a huge diversity of products (or components).

Each of those products requiring completely different tools, skills and materials.

[coderintherye]

Also https://www.opensourceecology.org/gvcs/

The Open Source Global Village Construction Kit. Blueprints for building the tools to build up a village.

[pstuart]

What a disappointment that turned out to be. It was a nice pitch, though.

[nerdponx]

Not a single condensed source, but there's an abundance of this type of content on Youtube, from both hobbyists and professionals.

[Paperweight]

The only problem with YouTube is that it's not organized. It's not indexable or printable. Videos are on Google's servers - here today and gone tomorrow. Videos are GREAT for stuff that you can't put into text, and YouTube excels at getting info out there from people who aren't that good with computers :)

What I'm thinking is a real-life open-source "tech tree".

[Someone]

If we ever need this, I wouldn’t count on the ability to watch YouTube videos.

Books printed on acid-free paper or clay tablets do not copy as easily as bits, but are a lot more durable.

An alternative is to make lots of digital copies of sites like these. That’s cheaper than printing them, but a bit less durable.

I wouldn’t know which of these would be the statistically optimal (as in: information isn’t destroyed, will be found by those who need it, and can be read) method, but I don’t think YouTube is.

[_sbrk]

> there's an abundance of this type of content on Youtube

.. who makes their money monetizing the content of others.

I respect this guy for staying off the commercialized hosting site and having such a simple, functional website. That is even before my kudos to his work toward duplicating technology from the ground up, and then documenting both success and failure. The latter is something many programmers, including myself, tend to defer until the end of time.

[Mite_]

Applied science is a channel in a similar vein. Tackles a lot of interesting engineering projects and walks through all of his results till getting his final product. Really interesting stuff.

https://www.youtube.com/user/bkraz333

[0xdeadbeefbabe]

> Or is that all forbidden knowledge

It seems like even scientists struggle to replicate experiments.