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It would be easy to dismiss Mitchell Joachim’s fantastical vision for ecological supercities, with their flocks of jetpacks and mass-transit blimps that look like flying monster jellyfish, as science fiction—if he wasn’t actually building them


Wonder if this can be of use to any ICAR or other future games game

[Very cool posting, so moved to more Sci Fi related area]

It's good to see that there are professors still coming up with bold ideas. I am not sure of the practicality of all of the ideas - as they tend to focus on broad aspects of society and feel a little like ideas for ideas sake. Are blimps actually more cost effective and practical than a bus? What about for the elderly or ladies carrying children? Big ideas have the benefit of being gleefully free of these constraints.

I do like the idea of creating buildings out of rubbish (just like Wall-E). I am not sure whether tensile strength can be gained from compacted rubbish just yet but I would not be surprised if insulation or some building materials can benefit from it.

Cool article nonetheless, thanks for sharing Doc!

The North-Eastern Seaboard Transfiguration (NEST) project in from the Anarchy Zones setting falls quite close to the ideas in the article. I'm not much of an architect, but at least some of the units would look like the one tower with the giant spire just off center of the picture. Admittedly, my building materiel of choice is diamond fiberglass reinforced concrete. (The fun you can hive with nanotechnology, and concrete mixed with graphite...)

This sort of idea has actually been around for a while, but its really nice to see someone working on it. Paolo Soleri coined the portmanteau "" from Architecture and Ecology.

I can't say whether or not blimps would be better than buses, but they can be more efficient than airplanes for cargo hauling. A lot less energy is required to get off the ground, and they're not required to burn large amounts of fuel necessary for a minimum stall speed. (ie a 747 needs a minimum of 160 mph with flaps deployed to stay in the air.) In turn, blimps can uses lighter and more efficient engines (many use diesels in fact.) Their V/TOL nature would limit the real-estate foot print of the aerodrome.

Another transport system I'd like to see more of is the . They're basically flying-boat/hovercraft hybrids. From what I recall, the famed "" needed 10 engines to get its 540 tons out of the sea, but then only two or four of them for cruising at an altitude of ten meters. The Soviet Lun class actually carried anti-ship missiles, but came about at a time when the USSR was trying to realign its economy after Khrushchev, so the second was never completed.

I love ekronoplans too. Here are the two articles that sparked my interest:

http://www.darkroastedblend.com/2007/05 ... wcase.html
http://www.darkroastedblend.com/2009/06 ... art-2.html