The RBE10K Project

The RBE10K Project

Synthesis

Pronounced Arby-e-ten-thousand, the RBE10K is yet another transition project to a worldwide-scale Resource-Based Economy. It operates side by side in a colaborative way with other transition sister projects like The Venus Project, and collaborate and support awaeness-raising movements like The Zeitgeist Movement and The Free World Charter.

Mission Statement

RBE10K project is a transition model to an RBE with a hands-on bottom-up philosophy, getting it done by the people committed to moving towards it without the help or assistance of external factors such as investment or sponsorship by wealthy people or corporations.

Inspired by the effectiveness of DNA and bacteria for their capability to grow very rapidly from a minuscule unit to colonising the world. Using the DNA and the bacterium of metaphors, a centralised knowledge-base system (currently this wiki) would be the DNA, and a community of 10,000 people would be a bacterium. Each RBE10K city would have three objectives, in the following order of priorities:

1. provide for the basic needs (as per the knowledge-base) of all its members using exclusively its own resources, sustainably, and privileging those resources that are available for it in great abundance.
2. improve its own knowledge-base relying as much as practicable on the methods of science, and founding a new RBE10K city every two years (inviting 10,000 people living outside RBE10K cities to populate roughhly half of the old and half of the new cities).
3. automate snything that can be automatable and develop science and technology further.

RBE10K cities would require each newcomer to bring some of the necessary materials and resources to help build the community, for a value of roughly 10,000 units of their currency (€, £, US/NZ/CA $, or roughly equivalent), non-refundable, and as per the requirements specified in the knowledgebase, using a system to establish allotments and administer priorities. Every newcomer would also be required to agree to a simple list of terms and conditions for life in a RBE, including giving up rights to property, trade, blame, personal opinion outside matters of personal preference, etc (such terms and conditions would be an essential building block of the knowledgebase). Newcomers would also be encouraged to commit to a minimum of two years participation in the community, while engaged primarily in assist with one or more of the three main objectives of the city.

In terms of maths, starting with one city in 2015 and keeping to plan, the whole humankind would migrate to a RBE10K city by 2055 (ie a 40-year long project), which would reach around one million and be the home of the 10 billion people that would be on Earth by then. Because of the primary concern with sustainability, it is not expected that population or number of cities would increase ever again from this number.

One can expect life to be harsh in RBE10K cities during the first 16 years of the project, while growing towards the first million RBE inhabitants and dealing with all the strange new world issues of a community with severely limited resources, educated and raised in our uncivilised/miscivilised culture, having to adapt to much simplified and possibly inconvenient lifestyle characteristics, without law and order, institutions, leaders or authorities. However conditions would rapidly catch-up and also surpass those of the current non-RBE culture, as a result of automated systems and processes, lack of waste of time and resources, increased psychological and emotional health, and having people contribute exclusively in areas of their most strongest interest and passion.

The project will launch formally in 1st January 2013, aiming at the first colony somewhere safe and isolated in the world two years later, and in those two years will engage primarily at recruiting the interest of a first community of 10,000 RBE enthusiasts and activists, creating the first draft of a knowledgebase in this wiki, initially in English but ideally finishrd and used in Esperanto (encouraging everybody to learn and contribute in Esperanto as an equaliser and normaliser universal language for RBE10K cities), and building and gathering all the resources that would be necessary for the settlement, ensure full self-sufficiency for two years, and enabling a capacity for remaining full self-sufficient thereafter. The total budget per RBE10K city would be us$100 million. Each settlement would also require a wide enough variety of skills to cater for self-sufficiency.