Basic idea

The Astrochicken is an idea Freeman Dyson came up with. (You know, the guy who invented the idea of the Dyson Shell). Basically, you pack together your best electronics, plant, and animal material into an egg that jets around using ionic drives to CHON deposits (such as comets, ice rings, etc) and builds reproductions of itself. It also acts as a probe, sending back information about what it finds. So it's a space probe that gives you exponentially increasing bang for your buck.

Reading this reminded me of an idea I had some time ago, before I had heard of the Astrochicken. Which isn't hard, since I first heard of that famous chicken in the sky tonight. Anyway, in light of the Astrochicken, I dub my idea the TechnoCow. And here's the idea:

You spend some time developing bacterial/algal/bamboo/whatever kind of fast-growing building materials (some plasticy thing from the bacteria or algae, and the obvious from bamboo). You also develop biologicals that do muscly things in the presence of water/heat/whatever, some that convert light & CHO into sugars, some that purify water, some that can make a copy of written material, etc. (Yes, this is a big project.) Then you package all of this together with (reproducable) instructions on care & feeding, and reproduction, and you deploy it to third world nations. Obviously the TechnoCow is a rallying cry for some so far pretty vague ideas, but I think the core idea could really do some good if developed. Of course, that central idea is to put together a system that can provide some necessities (food, building materials, water purification, information duplication, and anything else you can manage) and can reproduce itself, and get it to people who don't have even the necessities.

This seems do-able. Am I naively misinterpreting the problems the profoundly poor have? Is the main problem a culture of ignorance, or systematic repression? Or can a self-help system work for them?

The TechnoCow

List of possible systems to provide

• Sugars & starches
• Purified water
• Building materials
• Building forms
• Information duplication
• Artificial muscles
• Soil loaming
• Bladders

Details on specific systems

Sugars & starches

This is pretty easy. Find the plant (or several alternatives) which is easiest to grow. Provide the stuff you need to grow it. Maybe this is potatoes; maybe it's some kind of single-celled organism. Beans can also fall into this 'important foodstuffs' category, but sugars and starches are special for another reason: you can ferment them into alcohols for fuels, and in some cases you can use the raw sugars & starches for fuel.

Purified water

I am just sure you could find systems to produce layers of activated charcoal for filtering, microbes that consume waste products, and ways to purify water by evaporation.

Building materials

The obvious here is bamboo. Bamboo grows like mad given reasonable growing conditions, and it's very strong and light. I would think that you could find microbes that lock together to make tough, hard substances after they die off. The big benefit of the latter is that creating forms to let you create many things from a common mold would be very easy - you just use a simple mold, like a jello mold. For bamboo, I would think that physical forms, guided growth, and perhaps chemical tropes could do a lot, and perhaps some biological byproduct that dissolves or softens bamboo could be found.

Building forms

This refers to templates to create particular shapes repeatably from the building materials. You would provide some standard forms for important things (like forms for lego-bricks that could be snapped together to make larger structures) and provide the ability to make new forms.

Information duplication

The thing that comes to mind is making translucent materials that you write on, then when you lay the material on top of a growing culture, only the parts that can get light turn opaque. This would copy as a negative, but who cares, and if you do, just copy the negative. Of course, other processes may work out better, such as an ink that is a chemical trope for a microbe that makes more ink in the "paper" to which you're copying.

Artificial muscles

These could be substances that are very strong and shrink as they dry (like leather) or when they get wet, or forms for engines that run on alcohol, or any number of things. Artificial power is good.

Soil loaming

Some of the other parts, not to mention general foodstuffs, may require good quality soil. Biological material can be mulched and composted to provide good soil, but you need seed microbes to get that started, as well as filters so the water that gets into the soil isn't contaminated, as well as ways to grind rock into soil like lichens do, as well as earthworms to turn the soil, etc.

Bladders

This is a catch-all term for anything that uses tough, flexible, waterproof sheets. Bladders can hold water, protect from the elements, may double as the writing materials, and are generally useful. I don't know what the options are here - maybe a hydrophobic grass that you could weave on a loom you made from bamboo and a building form? Are there microbes that you can grow in a thin layer, and that yield something tough enough to serve as a water bladder?