This guys' videos are amazing. If anything should convince you that humans are a uniquely terrifying species it's these videos. Walking into the forest with nothing more on that a pair of shorts and a brain, he makes fire, tools, building supplies, ceramics, and entire living structures. The technology he produces by himself is almost on par with many pre-industrial revolution societies where metals (even though they had them) were too expensive to waste on building shelters.
For example, if he designed things a little differently, this would pretty much be what the average Korean, now one of the most technologically sophisticated civilizations in the world, lived in up until the late 20th century [1]: tiled roofs, wooden framed houses (they interlocked with notches instead of twine), raised floors with underfloor heating (still copied in modern apartments), earth packed exterior walls. If he had time to pulp wood and make paper he could do interior finishing, and the addition of maybe 1 or 2 precision metal tools he could square off wood work even better and maybe even produce nicer floors.
In many civilizations, metal cookware was simply seen as more durable alternatives to ceramic cookware and even followed similar design motifs [2], it can sometimes be difficult to tell from far away if something is a bronze or ceramic pot they often look so similar [3]
Pre-industrial revolution, human-scale technology can get pretty impressive, humans managed to settle an entire planet and all of its climates with not much more than the product of their hands, some ideas and a little patience -- basically what this guy has done. If aliens were to kidnap a thousand pre-Industrial Revolution random humans from around Earth and dump them off on a suitable, but empty world. They'd have it all colonized and populated in probably 10,000-20,000 years. That's not even geologic timescale.
The thing that terrifies me is that the law in many industrialized countries would consider the structure that he built to be unfit for human habitation, due to multiple severe building code violations.
100 years ago, it would have been an acceptable dwelling, or even desirable. Thanks to the pace of progress, in just 50 years, houses built to today's standards might be considered too primitive for human habitation.
And you have to wonder what is going to be invented before then that will make us look at the homes we are living in right now and think, "How did I ever live in such a backwards, primitive building?"
We might not even realize the importance of it right away. If you think about an indoor flushing toilet, it doesn't seem all that remarkable, but now every residence needs to have at least one. Grid power wiring isn't all that glamorous, but every home has it. The thing that changes everything might be boring at first glance.
And that's terrifying. A human can see a device with the power to change the entire world and still say, "meh."
And also aliens would probably need to kidnap at least 10000 in order to maintain a stable breeding population. Otherwise, the humans would have to establish some pretty strict rules against monogamy and inbreeding, and the aliens would have to carefully select a very diverse group to begin with.
And you have to wonder what is going to be invented before then that will make us look at the homes we are living in right now and think, "How did I ever live in such a backwards, primitive building?
If you didn't see it, you might appreciate this article from a bit ago about preserving some of the last remaining turf farm houses in Iceland:
Until a century ago, and even into the 1940s, the nation’s
skyline was dominated by squat, clustered turf houses. Yet
despite turf’s vital role in Iceland’s history, you won’t
see much of it today. Over a few brief generations,
Icelanders have grown ashamed of and buried this
architectural tradition, which has taken on the connotation
of backwardness.
If this guy built his house in an Australian suburb, yes, he would be required to tear it down and probably face a fine for failing to get planning permission. Since he's in a remote area, he can build the house if he wants to.
Australian residents agree, by their locally elected councils, that houses in suburban areas must have flush toilets. They believe that it's an improvement over dumping household waste in the street.
I think what the GP may be getting at, with respect to building codes, is that while some of them are valid safety concerns, there's a lot of them that can be attributed to "regulatory capture" -- At least here in the US, I've lived in one jurisdiction where residential electrical (120V 15/20A circuits) was mostly required to be in metal conduit (EMT or better). Elsewhere in the country, as long as it's in a wall, type NM cable (insulated solid conductors in a plastic jacket) is acceptable in the same situation. The only explanation I ever heard for this was that we were in the suburbs of a city where unions had historically lobbied for certain practices in electrical and plumbing work that guaranteed more labor had to be done. (I'm not trying to make a comment about unions here, corporations are responsible for many similar situations in US law.)
I grew up in New Mexico. Adobe construction ("mud huts", if you want to get all ethnocentric about it) was ubiquitous there in 1915 and is still common there today; it's substantially more comfortable than most of the modern alternatives, but also more expensive. Some of my relatives there had outhouses when I was growing up in the 1980s.
I remember doing a heat transfer simulation in a modeling and simulation class -- seems that the typical adobe wall was just about thick enough to induce a 12 hour phase shift in heat transfer (so that the heat of the day would reach the inside of the dwelling during the coldest part of the night, and vice versa). Thus cool in the heat of the day, and warm at night (this works well in a desert climate where it's very hot in the daytime and quite cold at night).
It probably took generations to arrive at the optimum wall thickness.
We have surviving adobe walls from four hundred and fifty generations ago at Çatalhöyük, but it seems likely that they've been in use for much longer than that, and just haven't survived. So we've had several generations to experiment. :)
Thank you, if people kept agreeing with him I was about to have an aneurysm. I have a rental property in upstate NY that was built in 1895 and is at least a century ahead of a mud hut. I'd argue several centuries, but I guess it depends on which civilization you are comparing it to.
Even mud hut technology has advanced well beyond huts. The "greenest building in Pennsylvania" is a glorified mud hut with underfloor heating. It contains more than just one century of advancements over the most basic earthen construction.
And perhaps you haven't seen the sort of houses that people lived in, even as late as the 1930s, in some parts of the country. Let's just say there is a good reason why pre-manufactured homes are popular in certain places. Upstate New York may not exactly be a representative sample for the housing conditions in 1915.
The idea that technology has some linear progression is an illusion. I stayed in a "mud hut" several years ago during a trip to Morocco which had running water, flush toilets, and electricity. It was built of mud not because the builders lacked access to "better" technology, but because big mud bricks were a simple, practical, and economical building technology well suited to the desert environment.
Our houses still have a lot of room for immediate improvements. For example having a flushing toilet in the same room where you wash your hands and shower yourself is probably not an optimal design. I've seen a few studies measuring bacterial communities that came into this conclusion. Not to diminish the importance of toilets, though. They are a fantastic Victorian innovation.
You also want to control air currents so that mold doesn't go to other rooms, but few designs account for this.
Many materials off-gas harmful chemicals. Formaldehyde, often in some glues, is one example. I see a lot of room for measuring and ensuring homes are healthy. Perhaps a big task for IoT.
Heck, nearly everything in a bathroom can be improved: faucets (re-adjust every time you use them, run water until desired temperature is reached); sinks (too shallow to do anything in, faucet gets in the way); medicine cabinet (reach over sink, too shallow so stuff falls out, fingerprints on the glass every time); toilet (cold, too low, smelly, spray goes everywhere, noisy); shower (curtain useless, water leaks out, run wasted water until warm, can't spray water UP at all, crowded for two or more) and so on.
Spider Robinson had a character in the Callahan's Saloon series that went into some detail on this.
Bathrooms usually have fans that vent outside to take care of moisture. All new homes have ventilation that replaces the air at least twice an hour. This is not to say that it couldn't be better addressed, but these issues have not gone unnoticed.
I don't see the terror. Many of the things we do today will one day be considered hideously backward and barbaric, sure (I've seen comments about manually-driven cars in other threads - how did we ever accept something so deadly as "normal"?)
As for people not spotting the value of something, that's ok - the market sorts it out. Not many people would have thought that the most urgent thing African farmers needed was mobile phones. But there was profit in it, so some entrepreneurs did it, and it all works out.
Maybe not 'terror' (that was just echoing the previous post) but its at least a sad thing that people living closer to nature are in actual violation of a building code.
Cheetahs were once down to a couple of dozen members; they are doing fine. A fun fact: any cheetah can take an organ transplant from any other, since they are nearly genetically identical (have identical blood/immunology factors).
A 30-story apartment building is not practical without indoor plumbing, structural steel, and grid power. The tallest dwellings prior to those maxed out at around 5 stories.
What qualifies as progress is a matter of opinion, but generally speaking, denser cities produce more rapid technological innovation.
I have no way of knowing whether the new mystery tech would make dwellings taller, or cheaper, or more environmentally friendly, or more mobile, or more self-sufficient, or better workspaces. It's the sort of thing that is only obvious in hindsight. It may already be invented, but does not yet have a practical and economical application.
Whatever it is, it might require a cartel enforcer to mandate it in order to yield greater benefit for the society as a whole. You're not being oppressed when the city forces you to give up your well and septic system and connect to the municipal water and sewer. In theory, you're achieving greater gains through (enforced) cooperation with your neighbors. In practice, you may be oppressed by official corruption in such a way that it wipes that common benefit out.
And luxury is relative. The poorest person in the U.S. can have a better defecation experience in a public park toilet than the richest king in the world could have had on his private, hand-carved night-stool 500 years ago. One day soon, it might be considered luxury to crap in a hole in the dirt... on Mars--as the alternative would be to do it in a pressurized closet, into a machine that recycles the water out of it and turns the rest into agricultural compost.
But you know what? It's not luxury to sleep on the sidewalk and get peed on by dogs after your house was bulldozed because it doesn't have indoor plumbing. Or because you didn't start building it in the first place. 30-story apartment buildings might be fine, but declaring buildings "uninhabitable" because they lack luxuries — and prohibiting people from living in them — is an injustice that falls heavily on the poor.
The intent of a building code and the actual result of its enforcement may differ by a wide margin. The injustice largely comes from selective enforcement under inappropriate circumstances.
I didn't intend to make a point about building codes, but rather about how quickly humanity changes its standards for technological advancement. For tens of thousands of years, a mud hut with tile roof and underfloor heating would have been a luxury accommodation. Now, for a lot of people, it's rustic and primitive, fit only for camping trips rather than permanent habitation.
Humanity is scary not only for its ability to construct shelters like this without any specialty-evolved biology, like a woodpecker's beak, a beaver's teeth, or mole claws, but because it can extrapolate the idea of shelter so far beyond our current survival needs that even a thing that well exceeds the minimum requirements is still considered obsolete.
Yes, and of course the result of building codes can often be justice — the people who died in the Haïti earthquake died of a lack of building codes, after all.
I agree that we take learn to things for granted quickly. I think that's unfortunate and leads to a lot of unhappiness. Forcing our addiction to needless luxuries on others is a significant way that it leads to unhappiness, but far from the only one. You also see people dying of lack of physical activity, for example.
I don't think it makes sense to talk about "the intent of a building code". Since we have not yet produced artificial general intelligence, building codes are not yet sentient entities with intent. Different people who supported the enaction of the building code had a wide variety of intents; the different people who convert it from a piece of paper into a pattern of human behavior, by enforcing it, also have a wide variety of intents. Most of these are unknowable.
The intent of the building code is the intent of the people who wrote it. The obvious intent of requiring seismically isolated foundations on new construction is to prevent deaths and injuries due to earthquake damage. The purpose of mounting newly-installed electrical outlets ground-hole up instead of ground-hole down is to prevent failure from a thin conductor falling onto the plug and bridging the hot pin to neutral. The purpose of requiring flush toilets was for better sanitation and less odor nuisance at a time when modern composting or incinerating toilets had not yet been introduced. The purpose of requiring low-flow toilets was... to make a concession to environmentalists while severely annoying everyone else with spinning unflushable turds?
For the most part, it is very easy to determine the original intent of a building code, especially relative to some other varieties of laws.
The enforcers of the building code sometimes betray that intent. This is unfortunate, but there is little that a legislator can do to control a cop or county inspector that may be separated from the consideration of the bill by time, distance, wisdom, and attitude.
Building codes do little good if they are not updated frequently, and appropriate for economic conditions. Earthquake-safe architecture in all residential buildings is not appropriate for Haiti, but it may be for vital infrastructure, such as water treatment plants, ports, power plants, and hospitals.
Thanks to changes in U.S. economic conditions, it may be necessary to revise building codes to make it easier for people to buy new homes costing $40k or less, rather than go deep into debt for an existing home with median price $230k. It does no good to mandate by law that the worst possible home that can be built is still too expensive for anyone to buy.
It should be obvious that one guy building shelters from scratch in the outback is not going to significantly affect the housing market. But there's always that one guy, that power-tripping bureaucrat out to make an example of someone, who ruins it. The problem is not the building codes. It's that guy, who uses them as a club to enforce conformity, rather than as a standard which may accommodate reasonable variances.
It's because of that guy that building codes should not have the force of law. You just can't put the power to knock someone else's house down in the hands of a jerk or an idiot.
While I agree with most of what you say, and it captures important aspects of reality, I think it's still a dramatic oversimplification of reality, to the point of naïveté, in two ways that are in some sense contradictory opposites.
First, it treats people as individuals unaffected by social forces, whose power is treated as unrelated to how they choose to use it. In reality, the dynamics of power in a social organization is an arbitrarily complicated topic, and deeply constrains how people who have power can use it; and people's opinions mostly arise from the conventional wisdom of their social groups, which is subject not only to the limits of bounded rationality, but also to memetic selection pressure.
Second, the legislative and regulatory process is far from the disinterested consideration of the common good you ascribe to it; it's a conflict-filled social process involving constant negotiation among regulators, legislators, and their constituents. It is a mistake to try to understand it as if it were a sentient entity attempting to achieve certain goals by choosing means that its beliefs predict will promote those goals. To a significant extent, the individual people acting inside of it are such entities; but their goals and beliefs are at odds with one another, and as a result, the overall system does not behave in such a fashion. Sometimes it may happen to do so, which is often because the relevant part of the system is dominated by one or another powerful elite that is sufficiently unified to behave that way — although often the interests it promotes are not the common good, but a narrower set of interests. More often, due to collective action problems, it thrashes around in ways that appear irrational and random if you attempt to understand them using the metaphor of a sentient entity.
Your puzzlement about how we could have ended up with such perverse regulations as those that gave rise to low-flow toilets is a good example, but in fact public choice theory abounds with examples.
I say these are contradictory opposites because the first amounts to treating human beings as isolated contemplators, sort of floating in a void, while the second amounts to treating them as mere cells in a superorganism, devoid of individual beliefs or interests, their individuality entirely subjugated to the goals of the collective — a sort of Hegelian apotheosis through what seems to me to be the ultimate degradation. (Perhaps with the occasional exception of that guy.)
I think that with a somewhat more nuanced theory of human collective action, we can understand what does and doesn't work about existing forms of social organization, and then collaborate to improve them, providing us with alternatives that allow everyone to flourish in ways out of the reach of hunter-gatherers building seismically-unsafe huts, out of reach of proletarians toiling in misery in Foxconn factories, and even out of the reach of Captains of Industry hoping fondly to turn our nation into a new Somalia or Honduras.
I absolutely agree with your assessment that this shows the real terrifying gifts of the human brain.
What we have to consider when comparing this work to pre-industrial societies, is that he had not to concern himself with getting enough food for the next day.
The tremendous powers of the brain can only be unlocked once the body gets sufficient nutrition.
Yeah, absolutely. Even with unlimited food at his disposal, it still took 5-6 months to do this. It gets easier with more humans, because some of them can specialize in exchange for the energy gathered by other specialists (hunters, farmers, etc.). You can have a guy specialize in nothing but cutting wood, or in nothing but making tiles.
Get enough humans together and you develop enough spare capacity to dedicate a few percent of your population to mine for ore and now you get metals, which give you even more spare capacity over short-lived stone and wood tools and the technological ball rolls on and on picking up more and more speed.
By the time we get to Mars we'll have pretty good robots. It's much easier to support them which is why they are trundling Mars as we speak and humans are decades off. It'd probably be a handful of people and a lot of robots.
At what level of industrialization? I find it hard to believe that, for example, one can build a 20nm chip fab with a million people, keep a fleet of emergency helicopters operational (you would need only a few, and that makes it harder to do) or launch a set of GPS satellites.
Which is where social hierarchy came in. For all the evils of serfdom et al, the modern world largely grew from the efforts of select nobles & upper classes who did not have to work to eat.
As screwed as the peasants were through all the ages, all the upper classes in the world won't make much progress if you don't have a relatively "free" peasantry from which to procure armies that can actually defend anything. Throughout history, when the free peasants (small farmers who could actually fend for themselves on land they lived on) became actual serfs (more or less slaves to the lords), their empires crumbled.
Until England worked this all out by creating the age of imperial commerce where the peasants became wage laborers who got paid before the harvest was taken. This is the creation story of the British Empire. The U.S. adopted it after Shays Rebellion.
The last unanswered question here: if all you have to participate in a market is to sell your body (brains and all), are you really free?
If working for money to eat is slavery, it is your stomach you are enslaved to. Empires are not the villain there. Were you free of the market, you would still be compelled to work to feed yourself.
You can even argue that the market is liberating, as it allows you to feed yourself with skilled trades.
That is what always bugs me with equating the need to work with slavery. Man has always needed to work, unless of course he lived off the backs of other working men, because shelter food and water have always taken work.
There are probably lots of settler novels, but I found Vilhelm Moberg's books the most captivating things I've ever read. They are largely based on some Swedish settlers' diaries from the 1800s in northern USA.
Bootstrapping from very modest means, but in a very rich land (climate, soil, water, forest etc). It took a while to reach equivalent standard of living compared to the Southern Sweden they left.
10,000 years is only 500 generations. Consider that we usually have reliable ties from the present going back 4-6 generations (our great grandparents, assuming everyone must age to be older than 20 before reproducing) and you realize that we're privy to a shocking 1% view of human civilization timewise. Amazing!
My grandparents grew up without running water, as did everyone before them.
The first US intercontinental railroad was built with muscle. The only exceptions were blasting powder was used in the tunnels, and supplies were brought up by train. The digging, grading, and road bed construction were done by hand with pick and shovel.
I've enjoyed this guy's videos a great deal. I haven't watched this one yet, but the blog post is excellent.
It might make you wonder why people have historically been so poor. So here are a few points to think about:
1. This hut took a highly skilled polymath 102 workdays to build, using a little capital he'd previously built up (the celt.). The opportunity cost in the modern economy is about US$60 000. How long does it take you to save up US$60 000? Now, consider what kind of house you could build with US$60 000 by means of the economy, or with 102 days building with robots.
2. The vast majority of people in human history have been systematically excluded from access to both the knowledge and the material resources needed to carry out this project. If you had the knowledge, you could always build a hut like this — but the neighbors, who are organized into an effective violent force with a hierarchy of coercion, would be likely to raid you and take it away, even though most of them are low in the hierarchy and are therefore not allowed to live in a luxury house like this themselves. Most people still live like that. Now we call the people who do most of the raiding "police", and they have bulldozers.
3. And yeah, food is expensive when you have to plant it, and historically speaking, groups that have planted food can support denser populations with greater productive capital (mills, houses, tools) and more stratified social orders, all three of which make them militarily stronger, so they gradually pushed the groups that just gather it into the poorest and least fertile territories.
This seems like a terrible situation. How can we fix it?
> 2. The vast majority of people in human history have been systematically excluded from access to both the knowledge and the material resources needed to carry out this project. If you had the knowledge, you could always build a hut like this — but the neighbors, who are organized into an effective violent force with a hierarchy of coercion, would be likely to raid you and take it away, even though most of them are low in the hierarchy and are therefore not allowed to live in a luxury house like this themselves. Most people still live like that. Now we call the people who do most of the raiding "police", and they have bulldozers.
What? No, there is no need to posit systematic exclusion - keep Hanlon's Razor closer to heart. Deliberate destruction of value does happen but it's rare. At any point in history most people have to work hard to get a nice house not because that's objective fact, but because "nice" is defined by what people can afford.
> 3. And yeah, food is expensive when you have to plant it, and historically speaking, groups that have planted food can support denser populations with greater productive capital (mills, houses, tools) and more stratified social orders, all three of which make them militarily stronger, so they gradually pushed the groups that just gather it into the poorest and least fertile territories.
The most valuable resources go to those who make most efficient use of them (military strength has very little to do with it - in the long run it's all about productivity). Isn't that exactly what we want?
Deliberate destruction of value and systematic exclusion are the norm in peasant societies. If you’re a noble, you treat the peasants living on your land as chattel (even when they aren’t explicitly slaves), and assault, rape, steal, or kill with abandon. If the peasants start saving up some surplus (of food or money or whatever), you take it, because to not take it would threaten your power.
As one example, a case I know about because I’ve talked to people who were there: in rural southern Mexico, which was mainly a plantation economy up through the 70s, the casual theft/rape/murder of indigenous peasants by landowners was common even 50 years ago. But the same was/is common in rural peasant societies everywhere in the world, say, all over Europe 200 years ago (more recently in some parts), or the American South up through at least 1900.
He did it as a challenge though and didn't use any modern tools. With modern tools and knowledge it would be extremely quick, easy, and cheap.
I built a 2 story building with 4 rooms and even a cantilevered walkway for about $3500 and about 120 man hours (combined time of myself and 1 other person working on it). Probably would have been closer to 80 if I had a nail gun but I was poor at the time and didn't want to spend the money so I just used a hammer. Of course it wasn't legal but it worked well and was super sturdy. If I had to built it to code and follow all the regulations I wouldn't have even bothered and it would probably have cost me over $100,000 and taken over a year to build.
I bought a book from Home Depot on framing for about $20. It wasn't hard nor expensive to acquire the knowledge.
Buckminster Fuller proposed that homes should be built from pre-made components that can be assembled. I believe he (or maybe someone else referencing him) used the analogy if we built cars the same way we built homes, you would have to order all the parts from separate suppliers. You would have to hire an engineer to come up with the plans. Then you would have to hire workers to build it. And at several stages throughout the process you would have to pay the local government money to approve your plan and get permission to build it.
He did use modern knowledge, just not modern tools. If you're using modern tools and materials, you can build a Hexayurt. And you should!
My point wasn't that today access to knowledge is restricted or that houses today are expensive to build — quite the opposite! My point was that building a house with Stone Age tools and materials is very expensive, and that this is indicative of the causes of the general problem of pre-industrial poverty. I agree with you on that!
I'm curious how much you could ease the process by using more modern knowledge, but starting without modern tools or materials. (You'll note that the OP used modern thermodynamics to design his kiln.) For example, could you smelt iron from sand? http://youtu.be/RuCnZClWwpQ outlines an approach that's definitely workable, but it's using a bloomery furnace — could you, for example, bootstrap a micro-Bessemer furnace? How about a lathe that you can cut threaded screw fasteners on? (Or even just wooden dowels.)
FWIW Bucky's mass-produced-house dream has come to fruition, which is how I was able to live in a trailer park as a child.
It wasn't very precise. I figured that a highly skilled polymath in a modern economy can usually earn US$150k per year, and that this is a bit less than half of a working year. How much do you figure?
Your numbers sound so out-of-whack because you're assuming that only a person with the skills to earn $150k is capable of building a small stone hut in a third of a year.
And if you read the article itself, a third of the time is spent waiting for unseasonal rain to stop.
I don't think my numbers sound out-of-whack; no, I wasn't assuming that; and yes, I did read the article, in full, and my comment is informed by that. Also, I think your aggressive tone is uncalled for and frankly kind of bizarre.
It seems to me mostly fixed. Places like China and Vietnam where they used to be really poor are now pretty prosperous. Africa where it remains primitive in parts will shortly have smart phones and be able to surf Hacker News and watch Youtube how to videos themselves.
My family once built something like this. We used ready-made roofing materials, but the rest was branches and small tree trunks, dried grass, and clay. The process went something like this: dig a hole until you hit clay. Put four posts for the corners such that the hole is in the middle. Put up a basic slanted roof and put straight branches over it, nailing it all together. Put grass and mud mixture on top of that and let dry, then cover with roofing material. Now you have a shady place to work! Keep digging clay out of the center hole and store it. Put more posts where walls will go. They don't have to be super close: 1-2 inches apart is just fine. Mix clay with water and grass again to make mud. Fling it against the newly created walls and smooth it out with a board. Wait to dry. Repeat form the inside and out until you have a solid 6-8 inch wall and none of the wood is exposed. The door was another ready-made item but technically didn't have to be. Once the four walls are up and the door is installed, create a floor and a hatch into your new cellar.
We then expanded this one room, adding three more. We built a wood burning stove in one of them using clay bricks and another stove outside. Once you can stay at a place like this work goes much faster. There is a huge advantage to using clay as the main material too: it keeps the inside very cool, and it is very cheap and easy to work with.
Then we got even crazier and bought a bunch of bricks. We laid the foundation of a brick house around the mud hut, then built up walls around the mud hut. Once the walls and the roof was up, the sledge hammer took care of the mud hut and the materials were carried out the front door.
Edit: oh, and we had no power at this location, so we did all of this using only hammers, manual saws, screw drivers, and a manual drill. Almost all the nails and screws were salvaged.
It held up great. The clay cured enough in the sun to not be bothered by it. It stood for 3 or 4 years IIRC. After that we built the brick house around it.
The reason we built this was because we got a plot of land to farm, but it was a ways away from where we lived, so we needed some shelter to stay there during the summers. Another requirement was that it had to be resistant to people trying to break in to steal stuff (it was).
I found the wattle and daub hut video [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nCKkHqlx9dE] (the first one uploaded by this guy) to be the most mesmerizing because it doesn't jump-cut through time so fast. If you have 11 minutes of adolescent curiosity laying around, it's really fun to watch.
I can highly recommend watching the 14 minute long video at the top. The video in itself is in my opinion very well done, but of course the content is what is incredibly spectacular.
The scary thing you don't appreciate with regard to roof tiles is the sheer weight above your head. We recently had our house completely retiled with pantiles[0], each one weighing a couple of kilos, and the timber frame construction holding it all up makes me nervous even now.
"celt" has an interesting etymology. A medieval scribe miscopied the Latin "certe" ("indeed") as "celte" ("using a celtis or celt") in Job 19:24, and based on the context everyone figured a "celt" must be a tool for carving.
If he says he's from Australia then he'd have to be somewhere along the eastern side of the Great Dividing Range in Queensland - that's about the only place you'd find that sort of rainforest.
In an earlier video (linked elsewhere in the comments), he built a fireplace with chimney. I think his goal is to make sure he's showing something new with each video.
Great video! You can see that this guy is not at all work-shy. It is only because I am absolutely on his side that I say this: he should have considered making angled edge roofing tiles as well. The sides of his roof look like the tiles will just fly off at the first significant blow of the wind.
If you guys find this video interesting you might want to check out the MMORPG called "A Tale in the Desert". It involves building up the entire world from small primitives.
You can't use green wood to build anything you expect to last and you certainly can't just shove it into the ground and expect it not to rot. It's interesting intellectually but completely impractical.
It is a bit more nuanced than that. I agree you have to understand how your building materials will age but it doesn't necessarily make things impractical. In a rain forest, green wood lasts a lot longer than you might expect. There are villages in the Amazonian rain forest with similar construction (not tile but mud and thatch) which have lasted for a while. In part because the wood cures slowly, and in part because things like the roof are typically replaced periodically.
It would probably be worthwhile for him to watch his materials over time and adjust as needed in terms of prep but I expect his 'hut' would certainly last the season and maybe two or three.
Given that he has his kiln set up, he is now in a position to actually build bricks for a more permanent structure, presumably that is his next video if he is working through the Big Bad Wolf hand book (hut made of sticks, hut made of mud, hut made of bricks :-)
You use that to build the shelter that you stay in while you're building your real house. Then you use it as a storage shed until it falls down.
Temporary structures do have practical value. That's why we have scaffolding. Architectural soundness may take some additional time, and you may not want to sleep in the mud surrounded by bugs for the entire duration.
Depends on a wood. The traditional Caucasian huts are made of the fresh, wet willow, sand and the fresh goat dung. Once this hellish mixture settles it stands for centuries.
For example, if he designed things a little differently, this would pretty much be what the average Korean, now one of the most technologically sophisticated civilizations in the world, lived in up until the late 20th century [1]: tiled roofs, wooden framed houses (they interlocked with notches instead of twine), raised floors with underfloor heating (still copied in modern apartments), earth packed exterior walls. If he had time to pulp wood and make paper he could do interior finishing, and the addition of maybe 1 or 2 precision metal tools he could square off wood work even better and maybe even produce nicer floors.
In many civilizations, metal cookware was simply seen as more durable alternatives to ceramic cookware and even followed similar design motifs [2], it can sometimes be difficult to tell from far away if something is a bronze or ceramic pot they often look so similar [3]
Pre-industrial revolution, human-scale technology can get pretty impressive, humans managed to settle an entire planet and all of its climates with not much more than the product of their hands, some ideas and a little patience -- basically what this guy has done. If aliens were to kidnap a thousand pre-Industrial Revolution random humans from around Earth and dump them off on a suitable, but empty world. They'd have it all colonized and populated in probably 10,000-20,000 years. That's not even geologic timescale.
Terrifying.
1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanok
2 - https://www.google.com/search?tbm=isch&q=ancient%20chinese%2...
3 - http://www.users.qwest.net/~rjbphx/BigPicture/PotteryGild.JP...