Research
From Questions to Evidence to Better Questions
Thrivability Solutions explores how people and the systems around them can develop in ways that expand human capability, strengthen resilience, and preserve possibilities for future generations.
The work spans several scales—from individual development to household infrastructure, community systems, emerging technologies, and civilization-level questions.
These areas are connected by a common approach:
Observe → Question → Explore → Test → Learn → Improve
The goal is not to prove a predetermined vision of the future.
It is to develop ideas that can become more useful through evidence, criticism, experimentation, and experience.
Developmental Civilization
The Larger Framework
The Field Guide to Developmental Civilization provides the broad framework connecting the research.
Its North Star is:
A healthy civilization continually expands people’s freedom to live meaningful lives while preserving and strengthening their ability to do so for future generations.
From that perspective, progress involves more than solving today’s problems.
We can also ask whether our choices strengthen people’s ability to understand, maintain, repair, adapt, create, and improve the systems they inherit.
One application of this framework is Foundational Access: exploring which necessities and capabilities people require not merely to survive, but to develop, participate, and thrive.
The Field Guide develops practical ways of asking those questions across individuals, families, organizations, communities, technologies, infrastructure, and civilization itself.
Thrivability Studies
An Invitation to Interdisciplinary Research
What conditions help people, communities, and living systems thrive—and remain capable of thriving across generations?
Thrivability Solutions proposes Thrivability Studies as an interdisciplinary field of inquiry organized around that question.
Thriving means actively flourishing, including developing and using capabilities to pursue meaningful possibilities. Thrivability concerns the conditions and capabilities that allow that flourishing to continue, recover, and develop through change.
This inquiry can connect engineering, ecology, education, public health, economics, governance, and other disciplines. A central concern is Foundational Access: how societies can make the necessities required to live, develop, participate, and thrive reliably accessible, including through arrangements that guarantee access.
There may be many ways to build a thriving civilization. Different cultures, institutions, technologies, and economic arrangements deserve examination against their consequences for freedom, well-being, ecological health, resilience, and future generations.
The Field Guide offers questions and instruments that researchers can test, challenge, and improve. VIPSEAD explores human capability; BLiSS explores resilient foundational systems. Together, these projects provide starting points for inquiry and practical experimentation.
Thrivability Studies is a proposal for collaborative research. Its development could connect meaningful careers around a shared purpose: helping people and living systems flourish while strengthening what future generations inherit.
We welcome researchers, educators, practitioners, and communities interested in developing that inquiry together.
Human Capability
VIPSEAD
Technology and infrastructure alone cannot create a thriving civilization.
People need opportunities to discover and develop their own capabilities.
VIPSEAD examines human development through:
Values
Interests
Personality traits
Skills
and the continuing cycle of:
Exploration → Application → Development
The framework examines how potential can become capability throughout life and how education, work, technology, and communities can support that process.
A growing area of interest is the relationship between people and artificial intelligence, including the distinction between AI that replaces human capability and AI that helps people develop it.
Foundational Systems
BLiSS — Bioregenerative Life Support Systems
Human flourishing depends on physical foundations.
Food, water, energy, shelter, sanitation, clean air, useful materials, and other essential systems must continue functioning even when circumstances change.
BLiSS research explores how these systems might become more integrated, resilient, adaptable, and resource-efficient.
Rather than pursuing complete household self-sufficiency, the approach examines how different capabilities can operate at appropriate scales.
Household Scale
BLiSS Homes explore systems that may reasonably operate close to where people live, including food production, water management, energy, environmental control, automation, monitoring, and resource recovery.
Community Scale
BLiSS Community Hubs explore capabilities that become more practical when shared across multiple households, including more complex processing, fabrication, maintenance, recovery, education, and community infrastructure.
Regional Scale
Some capabilities require greater technical complexity, specialized equipment, larger material flows, or professional oversight.
A resilient system does not require every capability to exist everywhere.
It requires capabilities to exist at appropriate scales and to work together effectively.
Emerging Technologies
Exploring Possibilities Without Depending on Them
Some technologies could substantially change what becomes practical at household, community, or regional scales.
Research areas include:
- controlled-environment agriculture;
- biological nutrient cycling;
- water recovery and filtration;
- renewable energy and storage;
- hydrogen and fuel-cell systems;
- resource recovery and advanced materials;
- automation and intelligent monitoring;
- autotrophic and alternative food production;
- distributed fabrication and repair.
These technologies are explored as candidates, not assumptions.
A developmental system should remain useful even when a promising technology proves less capable, more expensive, or slower to mature than expected.
Cross-Scale Integration
Individual technologies are only part of the problem.
Food systems affect water.
Water systems require energy.
Energy systems depend on storage, materials, maintenance, and control systems.
Automation depends on people who can understand when it is wrong.
Households depend on communities.
Communities depend on larger networks.
Research therefore examines not only individual components but also the relationships among them.
The objective is not maximum independence.
It is resilient interdependence: systems capable of supporting one another while retaining enough distributed capability to adapt when conditions change.
Research Publications
Research papers and working documents provide more detailed examination of individual questions.
Current work includes research into:
- household-scale integrated life-support systems;
- constraints and practical limits of distributed infrastructure;
- governance and stewardship;
- cross-scale system integration;
- subsystem candidates and emerging technologies;
- hydrogen and energy pathways;
- necessities, abundance, and economic organization;
- human development through VIPSEAD;
- developmental civilization and long-term capability.
Research publications are made available through open research repositories where possible so that ideas can be examined, criticized, referenced, and improved.
From Research to Real-World Learning
Research becomes more valuable when promising ideas can eventually encounter real conditions.
Where practical, concepts may progress through stages such as:
Research → Modeling → Prototype → Pilot → Evaluation → Improvement
Small-scale pilots can reveal problems that theoretical work misses.
They can also show which ideas deserve further development—and which do not.
The purpose of a pilot is therefore not to demonstrate that the original idea was correct.
The purpose is to learn something that could not be learned as well on paper.
An Open Research Program
Thrivability Solutions is an evolving research and development effort.
The work presented here should not be treated as a finished prescription for society or as evidence that every proposed technology or approach will succeed.
Questions remain.
Assumptions should be challenged.
Evidence should change conclusions.
Better ideas should replace weaker ones.
That is not a weakness of the research process.
That is the research process.
We welcome thoughtful criticism, relevant research, and opportunities for constructive collaboration.