Title is unrelated to content.

If you want "a hunter gatherer lifestyle with space age tools" read "Walkaway", by Cory Doctorow. This is the 3D printer fantasy future, where everything can be made easily with small and easily available high-tech equipment. It sort of works in the story. But in reality, 3D printers aren't that good. Somewhere, you need aluminum smelters, steel mills, and copper mines. Those don't scale down well to desktop size.

What this article is talking about is the classic pastoral dream, along the lines of Thoreau's "Walden". Walden is a bogus hermit life. Thoreau had income from a publisher in New York and well-off friends nearby he could and would visit for dinner. Or perhaps the hippie / Whole Earth Catalog dream. We know that doesn't work all that well.

Arguably, we've achieved pastoral life at scale. It's called suburbia. All the pastoral elements are there, in miniature. For a lot of people, that's good enough. If you scale up your own space beyond that, the maintenance gets out of hand. I have a friend who has ten acres and horses, and she's always painting or hauling hay or dealing with some water or power problem. If you farm, it's even harder.

How does the author propose that this work?

That reminds me of another novel called "The Diamond Age" by Neal Stephenson where everyone has a molecular assembler (i.e. nanotech or 3D printers on steroids) in their home. Putting aside the grey goo gone wild tropes, one thing that I suspect was realistic about the novel was that there were still rich people and poor people. Many people were still very unhappy and dissatisfied. Still the criminals and the corrupt.

You'd think that people would realize by now that material wealth (we've long since surpassed basic needs) does not bring happiness. IMO, past a certain point, happiness is more a function of society, family, status, and perhaps even purpose. Personally, I don't think the top three layers of Maslow's Hierarchy are on top of each other, but an interdependent mix. Even so, material wealth certainly makes life more comfy :-)

A more interesting question might be, "What would homesteading independence look like in the 21st century in terms of sustainability and so forth?"

An interesting extension on this is that the pencil manufacture which made his family wealthy is now workable on a small scale (allowing for the input of materials):

https://bridgecitytools.com/products/pp-1-pencil-precision

> Somewhere, you need aluminum smelters, steel mills, and copper mines.

Why? We already have plenty of materials that can, are close, or have potential pathways for functional substitutes depending on the application? We are already pretty reliably able to print metal with machines no bigger than a fridge.

What happens when a curable resin or impregnated plastic can sufficiently replace steel/aluminum/copper for functions? Why would a steel foundry be needed for the desktop then? There are more theoretical materials that haven’t been discovered than there are atoms in the universe or something crazy like that, so it isn’t beyond the realm of possibility or even likelihood. Especially if AI helps accelerate that discovery, as it seems to be doing already according to a recent Faraday talk in a Royal Institution video — "How AI is Reinventing the Battery".

It also used to be that you needed a large machine to make a plastic part…now I print some in 20 minutes with something that sits on my desk. If one thing is true, it’s that materials and technology constantly change and (generally) improve.

I'd beg to differ, I think the idea of reaching pastoral life in suburbia comes down to one's personal perception, I live in suburbia and I for the most part from the outside in would have everything the average person would like for a comfortable life but I am actively looking to scale, happiness comes from retaking ones independence and reducing reliance on the services provided in the comfort of suburbia, supermarkets, grid power etc.

Maintenance is a concern yes, but self perpetuating finances = free time and to quote Socrates - It is a shame for a man to grow old without seeing the beauty and strength of which his body is capable.

I had a friend who believed that large cities should be abolished and society should be made agrarian by law. She believed that that way we would have more free time to pursue our intellectual curiosities, unburdened by our dependence on and duty to urban society. I was like... I'm descended from farm folk. My mom grew up in a farmhouse that had no television and not even indoor plumbing for the first few years of her life. Have you no idea how grueling agrarian life actually is? Sunup to sundown, backbreaking labor, even for kids and women. (Especially women.) You wouldn't have time to write your stories and essays and play RPGs. The animals would need feeding, the cows milking, the eggs gathering, the crops planting or harvesting. And now that there are no cities and hence no economies of scale, there's no industrially produced farm equipment to help you with your labor, nor industrially produced clothing. You'd have to make those yourself, or source them from local small-scale craftspeople. You'd have to mend or repair them yourself.

As miserable as cities can get, there's a reason why people sang "How can you keep 'em down on the farm after they've seen Paree?" And as oppressive as today's rat race can be, it's paradise compared to even the cities of the past. You mean I only have to work for eight hours a day, five days a week? In an office where there's always adequate light and the air is constantly freshened and temperature controlled? And the company, by law, has to take reasonable measures to protect my safety and compensate me in case I do get hurt doing my job? Sign me the fuck up!

The first thing I thought of when I read the headline was "so, TFA wants us to become the Yautja?" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predator_(fictional_species)

(btw, RIP to the OG Yautja voice... Peter Cullen)

> Those don't scale down well to desktop size.

If you're going to smelt aluminium on your desktop you're definitely going to want three phase power into your house, and probably some sort of asbestos tile to put it on.

Probably quite a good extractor fan too, Shake'n'Vac isn't going to shift that odour.

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