Category: Responses
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Saddling the Future
Bruce Sterling confronts the reader with the problem of verticality—the dizzying heights of ascent with its slow release from warm temperature and gravity and oxygen and a protective ozone layer. Height has been a long looming quest for humans. In the opening volume of his A History of Religious Ideas Mircea Eliade begins by explaining…
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Sharing the Fire
When Thomas Jefferson wrote about the American imagination, he chose the metaphor of fire. Ideas should flow like light in the darkness, “as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.” Jefferson was one of the original American dreamers, a man with many faults but also an explosive mix of creativity…
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Structural Design of the Tall Tower
The challenge of building tall structures has lured people like me into the profession of structural engineering for a long time. Managing our gravitational well in order to elevate usable space above the surface of the Earth is harder than it looks. And it’s not just gravity holding us down. The ebbs and flows of…
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Response to “A Hotel in Antarctica”
I think that one of the most realistic messages in the story is that the separation between humans and nature is a fiction. People want to go out into nature, so you can’t conserve nature by blocking it off from people. Also, people are part of nature. When you can change your environment like we…