The modern world depends on connectivity — until a storm, a quake, a blackout, or a war puts us to the test. Good Ancestor builds, researches, funds, and advocates for open emergency communication systems that keep working when a storm, a quake, a blackout, or a war takes the regular ones.
Together they form a path for resilient and private communication in regional and global disasters.
Open software and open hardware recipes that turn a vehicle or a room into an AI-run communications hub — mesh networking, radio, and satellite reception — operable in an emergency by someone without radio skills. See this one in an electric VW bus.
02 Download it · keep itDevelop and customize curated offline libraries and a local AI librarian, sized to run on phones and home computers. Evacuation maps and first aid; the open-source toolchain for rebuilding. No internet required to use it.
03 Reach everywhereA low-cost open satellite design that broadcasts alerts from orbit straight to commodity cell phones — no SIM, no subscription, no cell tower. Our test satellite has been on orbit since June 2025, and your group can build your own.
Water treatment, power, banking, phones, and emergency services now depend on the internet and the electricity that keeps it lit. That complete co-dependence is only a few decades old, and we have not built robust solutions for predictable wars and natural scenarios. A regional disaster, a cyber attack, a solar storm, or a deliberate shutdown can take the whole stack down at once — and the places hit hardest are the most needy.
Early-warning and coordination are the cheapest lives-saved-per-dollar in disaster response, and according to the U.N. they are still missing across much of the world. Each tools we make or support is meant to be genuinely useful in normal times and become essential in a disaster.
The project began when ALLFED asked a hard question: how do you coordinate feeding people through a global catastrophe if the internet is down? These organizations shape what we build and where it goes.
Works in formerly ISIS-occupied areas with Yazidi refugee camps and remote mountain communities that have limited connectivity and no emergency weather or safety alerting.
In conflict zones, cutting communication is standard playbook — as tracked by NetBlocks. That makes emergency alerting and relief coordination across war-struck or disaster-struck regions far harder.
Researches how to feed the world through global catastrophes — and faces the problem of storing critical knowledge and distributing it when normal channels are gone. This project originated with their request.
We've used supply-chain management tools to coordinate disaster relief, and are exploring nonprofit partners to do it at scale.
Helps people in closed societies stay connected and safe from surveillance, with circumvention tools, threat intelligence, and advocacy — resilience against the digital side of a crisis.
A community makerspace running educational satellite ground-station monitoring with SatNOGS and TinyGS — building the hands-on electronics and maker skills these systems depend on.
A free, global broadcast network from space or high altitude solar plane would have cost tens of billions of dollars a decade ago. Several shifts brought it within reach of civic efforts.
The goal is simple: make civilization less fragile around the things that matter most: food, water, health, communication, transportation, and coordination.