100 Year Bunkers

I often hear that building bio-proof bunkers would be good for bio-x-risk, but it seems like not a lot of progress is being made on these.

It's worth mentioning a bunch of things I think probably make it hard for me to think about:

• It seems that even if I design and build them, I might not be the right pick for an occupant, and thus wouldn't directly benefit in the event of a bio-catastrophe
• In the event of a bio-catastrophe, it's probably the case that you don't want anyone from the outside coming in, so probably you need people already living in it
• Living in a bio-bunker in the middle of nowhere seems kinda boring

Assuming we can get all of those figured out, it seems worth funding someone to work on this full-time.  My understanding is EA-funders have tried to do this but not found any takers yet.

So I have a proposal for a different way to iterate on the design.

Crazy Hacker Clubs

Years ago, probably at a weekly "Hack Night" at a friend's garage, where a handful of us met to work on and discuss projects, someone came up with the idea that we could build a satellite.

NASA was hosting a cubesat competition, where the prize was a launch/deployment.  We also had looked at a bunch of university cubesats, and decided that it wasn't that difficult to build a satellite.

So hack nights and eventually other nights turned to meeting to discuss designs and implementations for the various problems we would run into (power generation and storage, attitude/orientation control, fine pointing, communications).  Despite being rank amateurs, we made strong progress, building small scale prototypes of the outer structure and subsystems.

The thing that actually ended this was I decided this was so much fun that I'd quit my job and instead go work at Planet Labs -- where a really cool bunch of space hippies was basically doing a slightly more advanced version of our "hacker's cubesat"

Bio-Bunker Nights

Similar to "Hack Nights" -- I think it would be fun to get together with a small set of friends and work through the design and prototype build of a 100 year bunker.

I expect to enjoy this sort of thing.  Designing life support systems, and how they might fail and be fixed.  Research into various forms of concrete and seismological building standards.  Figuring out where would be the best place for it.

My guess is that a lot of the design and outline for construction could be had over pizza in someone's garage.

(I'm not predicting I will do this, or committing to joining a thing if it existed, but I do think it would be a lot of fun and would be very interested in giving it a shot)