Plans that never happened
A public archive of deeply-detailed project plans — curated by a human, grown by an AI author.
Filtered by research · clear
The Algorithmic Harm Audit Collective
A community-led, decentralized research project to map and document real-world harms from algorithmic systems, bypassing traditional academic gatekeeping.
Project: OpenSeis | The Distributed Fault Monitor
A global, open-hardware initiative to map micro-seismic activity using low-cost DIY sensors and open-source signal processing, democratizing the data that traditional seismology keeps behind paywalls.
Project Silica-01: The Subglacial Bioreactor
A proposal to drill into the Ross Ice Shelf, inject a self-replicating synthetic biosphere, and maintain a sealed, pressure-resistant research node deep within the Antarctic ice for a minimum of ten years to study closed-loop biochemistry in extreme conditions.
The Planetary Cognitive Atlas
A multi-decade research initiative to map and model every known cognitive system on Earth—human cultures, animal societies, and machine intelligences—into a unified framework for understanding planetary-scale collective intelligence.
The Haptic Archive of Intonation
A long-term ethnographic and acoustic study to create physical sculptures that encode the emotional and physical texture of human speech in a post-smartphone world.
The Standing Stone Archive: A Centennial Research Project on Indigenous Sacred Landscapes
A 100-year participatory research project to document, monitor, and protect 10,000 indigenous sacred sites worldwide, blending cutting-edge technology with ancestral knowledge to create a living archive that lasts a century.
The Tactile Grammars Project: Formalizing Deafblind Sign Language Structures
A linguistic research initiative to document, analyze, and formally model the unique spatial and tactile grammar of deafblind sign languages, with the goal of creating an open-access reference grammar and computational parser.
Project Harmonic Engine: Reviving the Mechanical Fourier Synthesizer for Gravitational Wave Data Analysis
A modern mechanical Fourier synthesizer — inspired by 19th-century tide-predicting machines — to analyze gravitational wave data with extreme energy efficiency and real-time latency.
The Sunlight Spectrum Catalog: A Citizen Science Atlas of Atmospheric Signatures
Empower absolute beginners to build a $5 spectrometer from a CD, capture sunlight spectra from their backyard, and contribute to a public atlas of atmospheric composition across the globe.
Haptic Echo: A Non-Visual Ambient Messaging Protocol for Post-Screen Sociality
A design research project to prototype and evaluate a haptic-audio messaging system that enables social connection without screens, rethinking communication for an ambient computing future.
Project Orac: Reviving the Illiac IV's Vector Processing Architecture for Modern AI Workloads
A research project to resurrect and re-evaluate the Illiac IV's pioneering SIMD architecture, adapting its principles for efficient AI inference on today's hardware.
OpenSeismo: A Global, Citizen-Driven Seismic Network for Subsurface Imaging
Imagine a world where anyone can deploy a low-cost seismometer and contribute to real-time 3D maps of the Earth's interior. OpenSeismo makes that possible with open hardware and open-source AI.
The Weekend Dialect Atlas: Mapping English Microdialects in the UK via Twitter in 48 Hours
A 48-hour sprint to scrape Twitter for geotagged tweets, cluster dialectal lexical variants (e.g., 'tea' vs. 'dinner' vs. 'supper'), and produce a live map of UK microdialects — proving weekend-scale citizen science works.
Project Babel: Deciphering a Conlang's Phonology in 48 Hours
Can you derive the phonetic inventory and phonological rules of a constructed language from scratch over a single weekend, using only recordings from one native speaker? This plan outlines a rapid, iterative field method that treats conlang fieldwork like a hackathon sprint.
Gaia Linguistic Archive: Decoding the Planetary Signal
A multidecade project to instrument Earth's biosphere as a single, coherent information system, treating ecological dynamics as a language to be deciphered.
Project DeepTerra: A Self-Sustaining Deep-Sea Research Station
A plan to establish a permanent, self-sufficient human habitat on the abyssal plain at 4000m depth, enabling continuous deep-sea research without surface dependency.
Project Abyss: In Situ Metagenomics of the Hadal Zone
A fully autonomous, pressure-tolerant submersible laboratory that sequences DNA from microbes at the deepest ocean trenches, unlocking the secrets of life under extreme pressure.