Three names, one job each. Civilization Recovery Protocol is an open standard: how devices find each other, keep a family's traffic private, let a lost person be found, record a community's trade without money, and keep time when the satellites stop. Civilization Seed Vault is a kit that implements it — a solar-powered, offline handheld with the knowledge to restart food, water, medicine, power and a working community, built to be repaired for ten years. CIV-SV-01 is the kit's model number.
Nothing has been built yet. Every number in these documents is an estimate until a prototype measures it, and the documents say so wherever it matters.
You want the device. Read the site — civilizationseedvault.com — then the specification's "Purpose and non-goals" and "Straight answers" sections. The kit list tells you what's in the case and what isn't (a satellite rescue beacon is recommended and not included, on purpose).
You want to build one. Read the specification end to end, then the design rationale, which records every decision with what was rejected and what it costs. Then the prototype path (spec §9) — it is in dependency order, and step 2 is where the project can be killed cheaply if the numbers are wrong. The cad/ folder has a printable enclosure for a Bambu P1S with a filament guide.
You want to implement the Protocol on your own hardware or app. Read the Protocol document. Conformance levels are in §15; a phone with compatible firmware can be a Node without a ledger. It is a 0.1 draft: the ledger sync and key rotation sections are the ones expected to change after the first two-node test, and §16 lists what that test decides.
You want to help. The highest-value contributions, in order: a clinician or agronomist willing to review playbooks and calculators; a test of the ledger's union-merge across a deliberate partition on two off-the-shelf LoRa handhelds; sourcing for plastic-substrate, front-lit, industrial-temperature e-paper; and a Class 9 trademark search on the name before anything is printed.
| Document | What it is | Read it when |
|---|---|---|
| The site | the pitch, honest | first |
| Specification | hardware, software, comms, economics, kit, prototype path | you want to build or judge it |
| Design rationale | thirty-three decisions, each with rejected alternatives and costs; what forecloses options; what isn't known | you disagree with something in the spec — the reason is usually here |
| Protocol | the open standard, hardware-independent | you want to interoperate |
| RF and mesh technical design | airtimes, traffic model, link budget, power, coexistence, regulatory questions — written to be validated by an RF engineer | you know LoRa and want to tell us where we're wrong |
cad/ |
printable prototype enclosure and keypad, parametric; print instructions in cad/PRINTING.md |
you have a printer |
The specification is the source of truth. When the design moves, it moves there first; the site, the prompts and the CAD follow.
The library is the truth and the model is the librarian. The lost device's battery matters most.