The COVID-19 pandemic has demonstrated failures of our scientific, political, and epistemic institutions, but also of our physical structures. We believe that accurate and high-quality designs of offices and schools to be secure against pathogen spread of airborne viruses can be a) directly useful, b) potentially generalize well to future pandemics, and c) provide the necessary training ground for building more robust and ambitious projects in the future, including large-scale civilizational refuges.
We picked offices and schools to limit the threat model and surface area, but we’re in theory excited about designs that can contain pathogen spread in any well-trafficked built environment.
Is there a way to get more leverage on this? Maybe: - Research new sterilization tech (like shining UV-C light horizontally across the ceiling in a way that cleans the air but doesn’t harm people) so that buildings can be retrofitted more easily, without redoing the whole HVAC system? This would count under FTX’s project idea #8. - Lobbying for better air-filtration systems to be made a requirement for schools and offices as a matter of government budgets (for schools) and regulation (for offices)? I’m sure we could swing a state or local ballot proposition in a covid-cautious and wildfire-plagued place like California.
I think we’re bottlenecked more on really good designs than on the politics, but I’m not sure. I also vaguely have this cached view that a lot of whether built-environment innovations are used in practice depends on things that look more like building codes than office politics, but this is a pretty ill-formed view that I have low confidence in.
I guess that I sort of believe all three should be done in a sane world, and which things we ought to prioritize in practice will depend on a combination of “POV of the universe” modeling and personal fit considerations of whoever wants to implement any of these considerations.
Securing offices and schools against SARS-3
Biorisk
The COVID-19 pandemic has demonstrated failures of our scientific, political, and epistemic institutions, but also of our physical structures. We believe that accurate and high-quality designs of offices and schools to be secure against pathogen spread of airborne viruses can be a) directly useful, b) potentially generalize well to future pandemics, and c) provide the necessary training ground for building more robust and ambitious projects in the future, including large-scale civilizational refuges.
We picked offices and schools to limit the threat model and surface area, but we’re in theory excited about designs that can contain pathogen spread in any well-trafficked built environment.
Is there a way to get more leverage on this? Maybe:
- Research new sterilization tech (like shining UV-C light horizontally across the ceiling in a way that cleans the air but doesn’t harm people) so that buildings can be retrofitted more easily, without redoing the whole HVAC system? This would count under FTX’s project idea #8.
- Lobbying for better air-filtration systems to be made a requirement for schools and offices as a matter of government budgets (for schools) and regulation (for offices)? I’m sure we could swing a state or local ballot proposition in a covid-cautious and wildfire-plagued place like California.
I think we’re bottlenecked more on really good designs than on the politics, but I’m not sure. I also vaguely have this cached view that a lot of whether built-environment innovations are used in practice depends on things that look more like building codes than office politics, but this is a pretty ill-formed view that I have low confidence in.
I guess that I sort of believe all three should be done in a sane world, and which things we ought to prioritize in practice will depend on a combination of “POV of the universe” modeling and personal fit considerations of whoever wants to implement any of these considerations.