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Baby planet

In November 2013, I attended a working group with the Indonesian Embassy in Paris. Several projects were presented to French firms and round tables were organized to manage the discussions. Few days later, a French construction company contacted me. There were willing to make an offer for the construction of a base camp designed for the 6000 employees of a French mining company working on one island of Indonesia. The mining company was cutting off the map three mountains of the island and was destroying the primary forest. The construction company wanted to make an offer in order to use the wood from the local forest.

I have worked has an ethnographer from 1992 to 1999. I have lived twice four months in the villages of North Sumatra. I have seen Indonesia before the revolution of 1998 and after the revolution when I went back to Indonesia from May to October 2005. Indonesia has been the land that revealed the person I always wanted to be, kind an explorer and a sane human being, a writer and a witness. Age 11, I decided to become like Tintin, a great reporter, and like Tintin, I wanted to meet with the cannibals of Sumatra. I found many ethnicities and many lovely people who have changed me inside.

I had two option with the project from the construction company, or to deny, or to work with. The mining company already had a concession, they already had started to destroy part of the forest and nothing would have stopped them. The only thing that I could do was to show something more human, more respectful of the people and the environment. I could not stop the deforestation. Farmers on the same island were burning the forest too and on a larger scale than the mining company would do. The best I could imagine was a good project to diversify the local economy, and start a preservation program. The preservation would have four steps. Before the deforestation, during the deforestation, during the exploitation of the mining company and after the end of the concession. The construction company was asking answers for the third step using the materials of the second step.

When living in the villages, I have been living with really poor people, slipping on the ground and with poor resources. I was writing a book and they received me to make my study. I know the story of those people, what happen when a woman is pregnant, where she delivers, how the people get medicine, how the children go to school, what they do, their routine. I have lived with them. I know their struggles to send their children to school and their hope for a better future. I know also that behind the big names such the "U.N.", the "World Bank", the "UNICEF", there are some good people who really want to believe in a better world. But the thing is, big companies do not want to hear of that. There inheritance comes from the old colonial world with its own rules, and there is no space for humanity.

Well, I am not one of those big colonial companies and I have my own belief. Take it, or leave it, but I would not change. I believe in the social progress and I believe that we can live better if we care of the other people and the environment. I had about one week to design a project, which I have done:

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The village had 248 houses for 24 Indonesian employees each. The mining company wanted its French employees to live in different homes. There were 16 houses for expatriates. They were willing to have a media center, which is in the middle of the village. There are also 5 houses for cults, all religions, 10 technical buildings, 1 training center, 1 library, 1 house for the music, 1 space for sports, 1 landscaped park, 8 fruits and vegetable gardens (7052.16 m²), 16 livestock facilities, 5 mini golfs, 3 petanque areas (French game), 1 SPA, 1 massage shop, 32 barbecue areas, 1 climbing wall, 1 restaurant for expatriates, 10 Indonesian traditional restaurants, 2 canteens, one clinic with one laboratory, shops, markets, mails, walking parks and only 3 streets. The village was 502,400 m², that is 0.64 km², about 1/30 of a traditional French village.

Each home for the employees were having 4 entries, 1 office with computers, 1 library, 1 multimedia room with computers, 1 reading room, one TV room, 10 bedrooms with bunk beds, 5 bathrooms, 5 WC and 2 terraces. Also the construction was made with Indonesian traditional building technologies, the living standards were European.

The village had to produce its own water, electricity and food. It had to be 100% autonomous. For the production of water, I had suggested Eole water systems and for the production of electricity, co-generation systems using the methane from the wastes with Stirling engines. Vegetable would be produced locally and the meat would have been produced using Temple Grandin concepts. On the videos below, you can see the various technical solutions.

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Now, imagine that we travel to a new planet with different kind of people, vegan, non vegan, all mixed cultures. We would have to learn to live together and to be autonomous. We would have to transport our autonomous systems and install them instantly. We would need durable, performant, easy to maintain systems, and we would need them to take a minimum space on a ship, what ever the kind. The technologies above would be the solution.

When I traveled to Indonesia, I have always been amazed of the capacity of the people to understand the mechanic. They can open a motor, repair it and that's it, it works again. Stirling engines are this kind of mechanic. On the video above, we see one very sophisticated system with no maintenance at all and we see most ordinary systems with local maintenance. Developing countries can produce it almost with spare parts from old cars.

I am passionate with Stirling Engines. I never made a real motor, but I once wanted to improve the making of a fluidyne. I designed the sketch below and with a plumber, we made it. I went to a recycling pit to buy some copper, and I designed the fluidyne accordingly to the diameter of pipes. A Stirling Engine is only using mechanical parts to move the rotor, while a fluidyne is using water as the only displacer. A fluidyne does not make electricity, it is not a motor, but it can pump water as a motor would do. As long as we can produce heat from the sun, wood fire or any other source of energy, we can pump water.

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The Baby Planet is a concept project, built in Las Vegas with the most environmental friendly technologies. I am not an adept of solar panels because the energy to produce one single panel is not a clean reflection of the cost to produce it. It is not humanly friendly to collect the silicon, burn it 2000 celsius degrees, collect the steel from the mining pits and transform it into structures. It does not make any CO2 when operative, but it makes a lot of CO2 to make. A solar panel can produce energy for 20 maybe 25 years, and then it must be recycled. It does not work everywhere on the planet and it does not work at night.

If we compare the cost of one solar panel with food and phones, 2 american chickens would pay one solar panel. One iPhone could be traded against four solar panels. Five tools could be bought with 3 american chickens. There is no scale of value in this consumers world and solar panels have a very short life compared to the use we have of them in architecture.

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Everywhere you have human civilizations, you have wastes. The decay of waste produce methane which is the second gas after CO2 to have a strong environmental impact. Methane is biogas that can cook, make the light and the electricity. It is the most easy and friendly way to produce energy, anywhere, anytime for a very low cost.

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We cannot change the world, but we can educate the people, and this is what this project is all about. The baby planet will draw a concept of city village to imagine the way of living tomorrow.


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