Lunar urbanism
Apparently 'learning from nature', François Roche and Behrokh Khoshnevis are working on a concrete spray-nozzle that 'spits wet cement while a programmable trowel smoothes the goo into place'. They're now wedding that with Roche's own 'viab' device: 'a construction robot capable of improvising as it assembles walls, ducts, cables, and pipes.'
They want to build skyscrapers on the moon.
There's a movie coming out this summer called *Stealth* with Jamie Foxx that looks really, really bad. An AI bomber put to use by the Air Force - or Navy - gets struck by lightning, thereby rewiring its circuits into a predatory killing machine... What would be at least moderately more interesting, however, would be if a Roche/Khoshnevis viab/concrete nozzle assembly is struck by lightning, or perhaps reprogrammed by some strange shift in the local geomagnetic curtain: it thereafter starts building uninhabitably complex architectural structures out of a near-infinite supply of concrete from a nearby gravel plant. After only six days we're talking Tower of Babel proportions. Soon you can see the results from six, seven, eight miles away; soon from the International Space Station.
A group of grad students volunteers to go out and waterproof it, sealing and perhaps painting it, and the autonomous viab/nozzle takes on literally mythic proportions. Soon Robert Pinsky, former Poet Laureate of these States, starts an epic poem based on the legend of Theseus and the Cretan labyrinth, rewriting it with the viab/nozzle as hero.
It just goes and goes and goes. Soon all of the American southwest is a hive of concrete. Skateboarders flock en masse to try out its arcs and curves, deep bowls and slopes perfect for next year's X-Games. The galleries of New York fill with photographs and watercolors; avant-garde black-and-white films are released to great fanfare at European festivals; the President visits, complaining that it blocks access to resources vital to the extraction industry.
Soon the original - and real, mind you - purpose of the viab/nozzle is achieved: they are sent up to the moon, and Mars, and beyond - perhaps even to the bottom of the sea - in order to begin a more inhabitable, humanly useful construction.
They gaze back lovingly at the Earth, at the deserts of America, and the results of their ancestor's first workings. The future origin myth for a race of interplanetary architect-machines.
(All quotations from Bruce Sterling, 'An Architect's Wet-Cement Dream' in *Wired*, Feb 2005).
They want to build skyscrapers on the moon.
There's a movie coming out this summer called *Stealth* with Jamie Foxx that looks really, really bad. An AI bomber put to use by the Air Force - or Navy - gets struck by lightning, thereby rewiring its circuits into a predatory killing machine... What would be at least moderately more interesting, however, would be if a Roche/Khoshnevis viab/concrete nozzle assembly is struck by lightning, or perhaps reprogrammed by some strange shift in the local geomagnetic curtain: it thereafter starts building uninhabitably complex architectural structures out of a near-infinite supply of concrete from a nearby gravel plant. After only six days we're talking Tower of Babel proportions. Soon you can see the results from six, seven, eight miles away; soon from the International Space Station.
A group of grad students volunteers to go out and waterproof it, sealing and perhaps painting it, and the autonomous viab/nozzle takes on literally mythic proportions. Soon Robert Pinsky, former Poet Laureate of these States, starts an epic poem based on the legend of Theseus and the Cretan labyrinth, rewriting it with the viab/nozzle as hero.
It just goes and goes and goes. Soon all of the American southwest is a hive of concrete. Skateboarders flock en masse to try out its arcs and curves, deep bowls and slopes perfect for next year's X-Games. The galleries of New York fill with photographs and watercolors; avant-garde black-and-white films are released to great fanfare at European festivals; the President visits, complaining that it blocks access to resources vital to the extraction industry.
Soon the original - and real, mind you - purpose of the viab/nozzle is achieved: they are sent up to the moon, and Mars, and beyond - perhaps even to the bottom of the sea - in order to begin a more inhabitable, humanly useful construction.
They gaze back lovingly at the Earth, at the deserts of America, and the results of their ancestor's first workings. The future origin myth for a race of interplanetary architect-machines.
(All quotations from Bruce Sterling, 'An Architect's Wet-Cement Dream' in *Wired*, Feb 2005).
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