Figuring out what life means to oneself is a big task, one which most people never really get around to finishing. One can just follow the well-trodden path in front of one, feeling okay about the whole deal. To then vanish without much of a trace, never having affected the world much.
For me such a thing has never worked. To me the world has always been filled with possibilities, infinite things to learn and endless ways to improve everything for everyone. All it takes is a little bit of elbow grease and a big imagination.
That's kind of how I ended up starting this new project this year, called the Internet of Plants [1]. Originally just a cute little project to automatically water single plants, it has since drawn in a number of people beyond myself, with the scope expanding to high-density indoor farming, using LED lighting and automated irrigation as well as hydroponics.
This project is now on the verge of setting up its first small-scale growing operation, using about five square meters of shelf space with the goal to grow everything from lettuce and herbs to strawberries, passion fruit and more. Long-term we want to look at reducing costs sufficiently to make it possible to economically grow staple foods like rice.
The reasoning behind this is that if high-density indoor farming were to become cheap enough, it'd mean that food production could move close to where people live, valuable farm land could be freed up and returned to nature, even as food transportation, insecticide and herbicide all become rare sights, with massive benefits to the environment.
With each indoor farming operation being a completely isolated and sterile environment, there would be no run-off of fertiliser and the like into the environment, and crops could be grown anywhere, any time, with minimal loss and other compromises.
What excites me about this project is that it is both very taxing on those working on it - combining fundamental R&D, biology, physics, engineering, electronics and many more disciplines into a single project - yet the potential pay-offs are likely to be massive.
Over the coming years we could slowly begin to change the world economy, resolve many causes of food scarcity and related issues, while providing the technology and documentation for it as a fully open project. Truly, it's not meant to make a buck off anyone, only to make the world a better place. Not just for ourselves, or me alone, but for everyone.
To protect the environment, give countless people a better, healthier life and ensure that humanity's future on this planet for the coming centuries has been ensured, while putting a stop to countless destructive practices, such as the environmental destruction of habitats for the creation of farmland.
To me, this is the kind of project that truly excites me. Something that has meaning far beyond me, a hackerspace, a company or the next board meeting. This is what I want to do with my life. These are the kind of projects that I want to work on, together with other like-minded individuals.
The sad thing there is that as the preceding blog posts over the past years have made abundantly clear, I cannot see a clear path to this future. Many times I have thought that I was close to a break-through that would get me out of my current predicament and get me that quiet, peaceful life in which I can focus on making this future a reality. Instead I am still forced to fight for my life, fearful of slumlords and yet another knock on the door from police officers or others to either misguidedly 'help' me or inflict more suffering.
I cannot really think of any future this way. Not when my mind is frozen in fear just thinking about what horrors tomorrow might bring. I could have gotten any of those jobs this year and things would have been different, but for some reason I didn't. Maybe it's that I am intersex or that I have PTSD that makes companies afraid of hiring me. Maybe it's just that my way of thinking is too different and unsuitable for just focusing on developing the next iPhone or cloud-based webservice, soon to be forgotten or never even relevant to most of the world's population.
Hopefully I can still find the path forward from here to that future. I think it would be cool, and I hope others agree with me on this. Though my one success this year was to get hired by Hackaday to write articles for them [2], it's sadly not the kind of job that easily pays all of the bills each month.
Perhaps such kind of (remote) jobs are the things that suit me best: jobs which require a lot of independence, responsibility and ability to wing things successfully. I just haven't figured out yet how to turn this realisation into a path forward.
As always, help is more than welcome.
Maya
[1] http://www.nyantronics.com/iop.php
[2] https://hackaday.com/author/mayaposch/
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