Saturday 18 August 2018

island one

The always engrossing and thematic Things Magazine directs our attention to a visionary and indulgent overview about how we’ll need to reassess our geometric conceits when outer space is no longer the beyond and we are living in orbit or in transit or as colonists on world’s where constants lose their consistency due to our perceptions warped by scale.  A series of studies held at Stanford University from 1975 to 1976 invited speculation on the form that future space stations might take and produced some fantastically ambitious illustrations for insular habitats composed of toruses and Bernal spheres which were self-sustaining environments and generated artificial gravity from rotation.
The article and images invites one to imagine what will it be like to live under a wrap-around sky with the horizon at the vanishing point and gravity is not an obstacle but rather a force harnessed in one’s favour and making us a bit superhuman in our strengths and capabilities..