Some of the World's Most Bizarre Construction Projects (Sideprojects Youtube channel)

[Rhinocrates]

Meanwhile, on the theme of extreme getaways, more wacky hi-jinks (or low jinks).

The decor's really tacky.

Inside the luxury Doomsday bunkers where the rich will hide from the apocalypse

Lots of very wealthy people are very worried about civilisation collapsing - so are building remote luxury Doomsday bunkers to hide in while the rest of us suffer, a new book claims

www.dailystar.co.uk

The super-rich ‘preppers’ planning to save themselves from the apocalypse

Tech billionaires are buying up luxurious bunkers to survive a societal collapse they helped create, but like everything they do, it has unintended consequences

www.theguardian.com

Douglas Rushkoff Survival of the Richest

The depth of anti-humanist sentiment related by Douglas Rushkoff in his latest book, 'Survival of the Richest', is harrowing and illuminating.

www.popmatters.com

 

[Rhinocrates]

1930s wild proposal by Le Corbusier
in his defence he try to solve the problems of 1930s Paris...

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BP2qaqojsEY


How Paris would look like if build

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-_Td2QY-RVk

Corb was quite the prankster. He was in full Boullée mode there. The Plan Voisin was meant to attract publicity and outrage as much as anything.

In his book Vers une Architecture he coined the phrase 'a house is a machine for living' and presented the ocean liner as the epitome of housing. The resemblance that the Unite d'habitation and its clones bear to a liner is no coincidence.

Unité d'habitation - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

People disparage social housing but forget what preceded them:

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ue7wM0QC5LE&t=21s

Henry Mayhew, described Jacob’s Island in a letter to the Morning Chronicle in 1848. Whilst perhaps less poetic than Dickens, Mayhew is more exact in his description, with a focus on the scientific aspects of the problem:
“On entering the precincts of the pest island the air had literally the smell of a graveyard, and a feeling of nausea and heaviness came over anyone unaccustomed to imbibe the moist atmosphere. Not only the nose, but the stomach told how heavily the air was loaded with sulphuretted hydrogen; and as soon as you crossed one of the crazy and rotten bridges over the ditch, you knew, as surely as if you had chemically tested it, by the black colour of what was once white lead paint upon the door posts and window sills, that the air was thickly charged with this deadly gas.
The heavy bubbles which now and then rose up in the water showed you whence at least a portion of the metaphitic compound issued, while the open doorless privies that hung over the water-side, and the dark streaks of filth down the walls, where the drains from each houses discharged themselves into the ditch, were proofs indisputable as to how the pollution of the ditch occurred.
The water was covered with scum almost like a cobweb, and prismatic with grease. In it floated large masses of rotting weed, and against the posts of the bridges were swollen carcasses of dead animals, ready to burst with the gases of putrefaction. Along its shores were heaps of indescribable filth, the phosphoretted smell from which told you of the rotting fish there, while the oyster-shells were like pieces of slate from their coating of filth and mud. In some parts the fluid was as red as blood from the colouring matter that poured into it from the reeking leather-dressers’ close by.”

 

[Orionblamblam]

I'm considering your many and insistent past comments about people with, shall we say, lower albedos. One simply has to look further up this thread.

I just did. And much to my complete lack of shock, I said nothing about skin color (or ethnicity) whatsoever. You see racism where none exists. You invent racism for your own ends.

I'm amused at your comparison of space colonization to "lebensraum." When that idea was popular among early 20th century German collectivists, it meant to take land that was already populated and replace the current people with other people. Space colonization means to take *nothing* and build brand new land where nobody exists, and populate *that.* If you see these two ideas as somehow analogous, it explains much.

 

[Orionblamblam]

Meanwhile, on the theme of extreme getaways, more wacky hi-jinks (or low jinks).

The decor's really tacky.

A fixed fortification surrounded on all sides by an unlimited number of people demanding entrance and access to your stuff is not wise. Doomsday preppers wishing to survive the fall of civilization would be wise to remember that. Mobility would be better, and better still would be distance from The Troubles. If civilization on Earth is going down, better by far to be *off* Earth. When the Carrington Event happens and all the electronics on Earth go fzzzzt and the lights go out, the self driving cars stop driving, the public transit stops transiting, those arcologies will be giant tombs temporarily filled with tens of millions of angry, hungry and desperate. If they know that there is a bunker with lots of goodies, those who can make their way out of cities and arcologies will strip the land bare of vegetation and animals while making their way to the known bunkers.

 

[publiusr]

Well… the ideal bunker has grass and a tiny house atop it left open…and a hatch in the floor.

Looks spartan but isn’t.

There was a State Farm office in Clay, Alabama that was made out of a single-family home…looked like a single story.

Before they moved out due to leaks, they opened a closet that had a false floor and a ladder that descended into a carpeted cubicle.

Makes me wonder if it was something out of Leonard Lake and Charles Ng.

An octagon shaped house not far from there.

There was an estate called FORNWOOD along Tarrant-Huffman road, near the site of a brutal crash:

UPS Airlines Flight 1354 - Wikipedia

en.m.wikipedia.org

Flying Tired: The crash of UPS Airlines flight 1354

On the 14th of August 2013, a UPS cargo plane on approach to Birmingham, Alabama struck trees and crashed on final approach, killing both…

admiralcloudberg.medium.com

BTW they were using a shorter runway because some lights were down…same airport where this happened:

Ala airport using cabinet like one that killed boy

BIRMINGHAM, Ala. — Birmingham’s airport is still using a large panel of video monitors similar to one that tipped over and killed a 10-year-old Kansas boy last week. The appr…

www.sandiegouniontribune.com

Skinflints..

We had a wonderful train station in Birmingham…once:

Birmingham Terminal Station - Wikipedia

en.m.wikipedia.org

 

[Orionblamblam]

Well… the ideal bunker has grass and a tiny house atop it left open…and a hatch in the floor.

Adequate for short-term use, or for against small-scale invasion (burglars and the like). But if you're planning on civilizational collapse, you need *farmland.* And you need to *protect* farmland. Which means not just walls, but guards. And to have guards, you need to have a population base adequate to support guards. Basically, you need a community. But imagine a small town surrounded by farms trying to hold off the population of, say, Chicago or Los Angeles.

Good luck with that.

 

[publiusr]

How far can they get on an empty stomach?

 

[Kat Tsun]

Adequate for short-term use, or for against small-scale invasion (burglars and the like). But if you're planning on civilizational collapse, you need *farmland.* And you need to *protect* farmland. Which means not just walls, but guards. And to have guards, you need to have a population base adequate to support guards. Basically, you need a community. But imagine a small town surrounded by farms trying to hold off the population of, say, Chicago or Los Angeles.

Good luck with that.

Fires are good for farmland, which means that being razed periodically probably helps keep nutrients in the soil, so what's the problem?

The only thing that needs to be protected is the political class and its executors after all, because farms don't have walls, but Rome did.

Anyway, without GPS locked tractors that can't be repaired outside a factory, central distribution coordinated trucks to deliver synthetically manufactured fertilizer, or integrated circuit built solar panels and smart power bricks to provide energy to computer controlled water pumps, the farmers aren't going to do much lol. They'll just starve too. So you better hope electricity doesn't vanish, or else most of the world's present population will need to die.

I guess maybe the Pashtuns and the Amish could survive at the end of it though, since they actually sort of remember how to farm. The Amish are pacifists though, and the Pashtuns are being poisoned by cheap Chinese water pumps and solar panels, so maybe they won't. Who knows.

Also, space colonies would be closer to Prussian or Soviet militaries-with-a-state than kumbaya American libertarian cowboy myths.

---

I always thought that Tallinn had some good urban planning and homey/comfy architecture:



Very pretty and wholesome. It's not un-built, but it resembles a lot of 1970's and '80's "new urbanism" stuff, and it's generally livable. All services, schools, doctors, etc. are within walking distance of your home, and there's a big ring for public transit. The only thing it's missing is a more distributed footprint, with shorter buildings, to reduce maintenance demands (between 3 to 5 stories maximum) on the individual structures.

Old Israeli Kibbutzim are also nice since they incorporated some of the more utopian elements of Soviet urbanism, like communal living, and a combination of urban and rural life into a single homogeneity. Unfortunately, aside from maybe a few that managed to transition to making things like armored vehicles and diamond cutting blades, they're too low profit to survive in the modern Israeli economy, and they generally abandoned the communal life that made them strong by the '80's anyway.

 

[Rhinocrates]

I just did. And much to my complete lack of shock, I said nothing about skin color (or ethnicity) whatsoever. You see racism where none exists. You invent racism for your own ends.

Clutching at straws matey. You've been repeatedly warned by admins about your rants about Black inclusion, leading to an addition to forum rules about specific references to racial politics being banned. Nonetheless, you still ranted about how fortifications were necessary to keep out foreigners who were irredeemably useless or pernicious. I see you've deleted your reference to concentration camps and trebuchets as being necessary for being too obvious. I doubt you're even fooling yourself.

Your own words are not so much a dogwhistle as a bullhorn:

vast numbers of skill-poor uncultured resource consumers into the economy will only make it worse. You need arcologies to house millions of migrants, but you can't use *them* to build or pay for the damned things.

So it will be incumbent upon the others that *you* don't be stupid... or don't be in the colony.

So they're pre-emptively deemed stupid, unskilled, unteachable. Not worthy of survival in a world whose collapse you so gleefully await. Have your forgotten that the nuclear weapons you fetishise were developed by immigrants to the US?

That's why I support space colonies. The denizens of those will *have* to be smart, educated, hard-working with dogged determination to maintain scientific excellence and engineering rigor. Those who don't will die, quickly. So in a few generations they can come back and repopulate a devastated and depopulated Earth.

'If you will the end, you must will the means' - Francis Urquhart. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Cards_(British_TV_series). You've made the means explicit and delight in it.

Do you wonder why I added Doktor Merkwürdigliebe's speech?

I'm amused at your comparison of space colonization to "lebensraum." When that idea was popular among early 20th century German collectivists, it meant to take land that was already populated and replace the current people with other people. Space colonization means to take *nothing* and build brand new land where nobody exists, and populate *that.* If you see these two ideas as somehow analogous, it explains much.

It does explain much. The psychology not analogous but identical. As I've said, wars have been fought over material resources, but wars have been fought over human minds too and often with greater malice and outright cruelty. If the Judean People's Front builds a space colony, then they'll inevitably see the People's Front of Judea as competition and try to eliminate them before they get a head start on populating the universe. If you think the universe is your manifest destiny, the thought that it could be someone else's will be intolerable.

What would you think if Xi Jinping announced a plan to build a space colony and start mining asteroids? I do not consider the prospect at all unlikely.

Seeing that sort of thinking presented as if it were a fixed, indeed metaphysical, law lends a lot of credence to the Dark Forest solution to the Fermi Paradox, only the predators never make it out of the glade before they consume each other.

 

[Orionblamblam]

So they're pre-emptively deemed stupid, unskilled, unteachable. Not worthy of survival in a world whose collapse you so gleefully await.

Ah. You're another one of *those,* unable to tell the difference between a warning of danger and a *desire* for danger. How sad for you.

The rest of your misunderstandings now make sense.

 

[Orionblamblam]

Fires are good for farmland, which means that being razed periodically probably helps keep nutrients in the soil, so what's the problem?

When the cities fall, the hordes will not only eat the corn on the stalk, they'll eat the seed corn. There'll be nothing left to plant.

So you better hope electricity doesn't vanish, or else most of the world's present population will need to die.

Yes, that's been my point.

I guess maybe the Pashtuns and the Amish could survive at the end of it though, since they actually sort of remember how to farm. The Amish are pacifists though,

You never see the Amish in the zombie apocalypse movies...

 

[Rhinocrates]

Well… the ideal bunker has grass and a tiny house atop it left open…and a hatch in the floor.

Looks spartan but isn’t.

There was a State Farm office in Clay, Alabama that was made out of a single-family home…looked like a single story.

Before they moved out due to leaks, they opened a closet that had a false floor and a ladder that descended into a carpeted cubicle.

Makes me wonder if it was something out of Leonard Lake and Charles Ng.

An octagon shaped house not far from there.

There was an estate called FORNWOOD along Tarrant-Huffman road, near the site of a brutal crash:

UPS Airlines Flight 1354 - Wikipedia

en.m.wikipedia.org

Flying Tired: The crash of UPS Airlines flight 1354

On the 14th of August 2013, a UPS cargo plane on approach to Birmingham, Alabama struck trees and crashed on final approach, killing both…

admiralcloudberg.medium.com

BTW they were using a shorter runway because some lights were down…same airport where this happened:

Ala airport using cabinet like one that killed boy

BIRMINGHAM, Ala. — Birmingham’s airport is still using a large panel of video monitors similar to one that tipped over and killed a 10-year-old Kansas boy last week. The appr…

www.sandiegouniontribune.com

Skinflints..

We had a wonderful train station in Birmingham…once:

Birmingham Terminal Station - Wikipedia

en.m.wikipedia.org

That is indeed sad. Both Japan and Europe see trains as being representative of modern civilisation. Train stations were built not just as functional facilities but as expressions of civilisational pride. Their demolition is tragic. The vulgar term 'enshittification' was coined to describe the decline of online media (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification), but it's older than that.

 

[Rhinocrates]

There is a special romance to rail. Leslie Ragan, Pierre Masseau, A M Cassandre, and J M W Turner. If you watch Blade Runner 2049, you'll see the Turner in Deckard's home in the ruins of Las Vegas. An image of lost promise.

 

[Orionblamblam]

There is a special romance to rail.

Just as there is with ocean liners and zeppelins. But romance tends to not do so well against "efficiency" or "efficacy."

Bring on the VTOLs!

 

[Rhinocrates]

Civil engineering has always pushed the limits of construction. The Forth Bridge may not be the prettiest structure on the planet, but it's grand and sublime. Fun fact: the masts of the Queen Elizabeth and Prince of Wales aircraft carriers are articulated so that they can pass under it! I rode over it when I visited Edinburgh to see the birthplace of my grandfather in Cowdenbeath, Fifeshire. Iain Banks' novel, The Bridge, was inspired by it.

 

[Michel Van]

Japanese proposed Mega-projects, again modern solution for problem of Tokyo.

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZADlkbr7Avg

 

[Orionblamblam]

Japanese proposed Mega-projects, again modern solution for problem of Tokyo.

A problem that doesn't seem to exist anymore: a burgeoning population.

 

[Rhinocrates]

Speaking of bridges, the Millau Viaduct by Foster + Partners and Michel Virlogeux.

Millau Viaduct - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HYzdwJGJEvw

 

[Rhinocrates]

Ah. You're another one of *those,* unable to tell the difference between a warning of danger and a *desire* for danger. How sad for you.

The rest of your misunderstandings now make sense.

Ah, 'us' versus 'them' again, or 'those.' Since you keep repeating visions of apocalypse caused by untermenschen overrunning the world with such glee, I think that you're projecting you own morbid obsessions. As a descendent of immigrants - as are you, by the way - I just don't see people different from myself as a threat to my identity. Instead, I find other people from other cultures interesting. I've taught hundreds of them and it's been a privilege. I've learned from every one of them.

Still, if you want to describe my vices, real or imagined, be my guest. If you come up with some new ones, I'll try to fit them in my schedule. I won't bother with xenophobia though - it's claustrophobic.

Your scenarios are consistently based on a conception of other people as threats. Sure, flying purple people eaters might overrun the world. Or not. They're not inevitable. History is not deterministic and the future depends on the choices we make. Somehow, I don't think you're Hari Seldon.

A fanatic is someone who won't shut up, and won't change the subject. - Winston Churchill.

Yet again, this thread is about the fascination of strange architecture so chill, dude. Take a dose of cat. Let a little joy into your life. Save the rest for your own blog. Abide, you know. Contribute to this thread instead of appropriating it as a platform for your own paranoia. As your own tagline says, offer something positive or STFU. What have you got to contribute other than bile?

 

[Rhinocrates]

I mentioned Lebbeus Woods before. Like Boullée, his intention was not to build but to present imaginary possibilities. He had an astonishing technique, but what might resonate here are his illustrations to short stories by Arthur C. Clarke. These are from a collection, called The Sentinel.

 

[Rhinocrates]

Some of his more fanciful work. 'Aerial Paris.'

 

[Orionblamblam]

Ah, 'us' versus 'them' again, or 'those.' Since you keep repeating it with such glee, I think that you're projecting. As a descendent of immigrants - as are you, by the way - I don't see people different from myself as a threat to my identity.

That's nice for you.

If you want to describe my vices, real or imagined, be my guest.

Nah. You're not that interesting to me.

Your scenarios are consistently based on a conception of other people as threats.

Yeah. An understanding of human nature and history will do that. How many cars come with door locks, or require keys to start them? Why do you think that might possibly be? Here's a hint: there is a sufficient strain of awful in humanity to make some preparations for awfulness to be sensible. That's why space colonies are not only sensible but long-term mandatory if humanity is to survive. Because if we stay cooped up on this one rock, sooner or later someone will bring it all crashing down. Arcologies, no matter how insular, insulated and cut off, won't be enough to protect their inhabitants from what's coming.

 

[Rhinocrates]

A few more. One you might recognise from Twelve Monkeys. Terry Gilliam never gave credit for that and lawyers got involved...

 

[Rhinocrates]

You'll have heard of Reaction Engines' Skylon, no doubt - and been disappointed by the lack of follow though so far. It was named in honour of this obelisk erected for the festival of Britain, 1951 - on the centenary of the Great Exhibition of 1851, which saw the creation of the Crystal Palace. It was a great demonstration of tensegrity and as you can see, the spindle shape was distinctive. There was, for a while, a campaign to recreate it, led by the architect Sir Richard Rogers, Alas, it died with him.

 

[Orionblamblam]

It was a great demonstration of tensegrity and as you can see, the spindle shape was distinctive.

Hmmm...

 

[Rhinocrates]

That's nice for you.

Nah. You're not that interesting to me.

You'd ignore me if I wasn't.

Personally, I'm interested in exploring your pathology. Your mode is something one should understand to avoid the outcome that you desire.

Yeah. An understanding of human nature and history will do that. How many cars come with door locks, or require keys to start them? Why do you think that might possibly be? Here's a hint: there is a sufficient strain of awful in humanity to make some preparations for awfulness to be sensible. That's why space colonies are not only sensible but long-term mandatory if humanity is to survive. Because if we stay cooped up on this one rock, sooner or later someone will bring it all crashing down. Arcologies, no matter how insular, insulated and cut off, won't be enough to protect their inhabitants from what's coming.

I happen to take my meds, play with cats, get out and about, meet people, understand that the progress of humanity has depended on people managing to work together. Every positive thing we have achieved has ultimately depended on a degree of trust. The same will be true of space colonies but the confinement and monomaniacal oligarchy needed to actually construct them is not promising of a grand future of freedom. There may be a path to the deep future, but that fascist (yes, I used the f-word) vision had better not be it.

And what the Hell is it about arcologies? You go on an on about them. I never said I liked them much myself. An infamous rhetorical fallacy is the argument of the excluded middle or false dilemma - i.e., to claim that it must be one extreme of the other, with nothing in between or on another axis.

False dilemma - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Have a look at the Churchill quote above.

Again, what do you have to contribute here? Look at your own tagline.

Come on, what's an interesting example of architecture that you'd like to share?

 

[Rhinocrates]

So here we go again. I happen to think that this is an interesting thread. Let's see what we can contribute. This is Isambard Kingdom Brunel. You've got to love Victorian names.

He's most famous for building much of Britain's rail infrastructure in the 19th century but here he is during the construction of the greatest ship of his time, the Great Eastern. Jules Verne wrote a book about it called A Floating City. That may well have inspired Le Corbusier's own adulation of liners, which he wrote of in Vers Une Architecture. It was a truly bizarre design in that it had paddles, screws, and sails.

SS Great Eastern - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

A Floating City - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

The Great Eastern was a commercial failure and the stress of building it killed Brunel, but was historically significant by laying laying the transatlantic telegraph cable.

 

[Orionblamblam]

You'd ignore me if I wasn't.

Personally, I'm interested in exploring your pathology.

Oh, goody, I have a stalker.

I happen to take my meds,

Hmm.

Come on, what's an interesting example of architecture that you'd like to share?

Unless that's too forward thinking for you. Then, perhaps this:

 

[Rhinocrates]

For what it's worth, there's a good documentary about Gerard K. O'Neill's thought floating about, with words from the horse's mouth. It's worth thinking about his own motivations.

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cuYKGOBTTig

 

[Rhinocrates]

Oh, goody, I have a stalker.

As I said, as you said, one shouldn't ignore warnings. And you don't take your meds? My favourite is Scotch.

So you've presented various images by Davis, Boullée and Wright. What do you have to say about them?

I happen to find the various pictures of space colonies about as plausible and as kitsch as this image below. Boullée was making a purely theoretical point with the Newton Cenotaph but the man who tried to make his ideas a reality was Albert Speer - and you know who he worked for. You see, anyone with sufficient skill can make a picture of something but that doesn't make it destiny and often that's a good thing.

In Paradise Lost, Mulciber was the architect of Heaven... but also of Pandemonium.

 

[Rhinocrates]

Just a reminder. Speer's Grossehalle, for the remodelled Berlin, to be renamed 'Germania.' They got as far as exploring the foundations but found that Berlin's ground was too soft. Oh dear, Aryan soil was just not up to the task.

Some studies suggested that humidity caused by the exhalations of the gathered crowds inside would result in rainclouds forming under the dome. There's a rather delightful irony in Nazis being rained upon by their own wet breath.

 

[Orionblamblam]

As I said, as you said, one shouldn't ignore warnings.

I will take that threat for what it is.

So you've presented various images by Davis, Boullée and Wright. What do you have to say about them?

They are all impractical. They were all forward thinking and imaginative. One of them stands a chance not only of being built in some form, but in being the blueprint for the way in which the vast majority of humanity will ultimately live. If humanity lives.

 

[Rhinocrates]

Now, some joy, since someone is so lacking a sense of humour. Viennese architect Friedensreich Hundertwasser. He retired to northern New Zealand and one of his projects was a block of toilets. A marijuana plant was found growing on the roof.

 

[Rhinocrates]

I will take that threat for what it is.

Oh the call of every broflake: 'I'm the real victim here!'

'Help, help, I'm being repressed!'

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t2c-X8HiBng

Well, it's much needed diversion from editing a bibliography for a client's PhD thesis on - would you believe it - biomimetics. My nightmares are going to consist entirely of DOIs.

 

[Rhinocrates]

One of them stands a chance not only of being built in some form, but in being the blueprint for the way in which the vast majority of humanity will ultimately live. If humanity lives.

I'm sorry to break it to you, but Jeff Bezos doesn't give a dingo's kidney about little people like you or I. I just happen to know it. The 'effective altruism' of plutocrats and self-declared visionaries has only given us grifters like Sam Bankman-Fried. Pray it doesn't give us worse, because there are far too many examples.

 

[Orionblamblam]

I'm sorry to break it to you, but Jeff Bezos doesn't give a dingo's kidney ...

And it doesn't matter whether he does or not. The kings of Spain and France and England didn't give a damn about the little people, but their desire for the wealth of the New World paved the way for The Little People to colonize it. But unlike back then, the colonies of the future won't have the ethical problem of displacing natives to worry about.

If Bezos and Musk and such don't care about little people, it doesn't matter, so long as they develop the tech that allows the little people to colonize the universe.

 

[Rhinocrates]

And it doesn't matter whether he does or not. The kings of Spain and France and England didn't give a damn about the little people, but their desire for the wealth of the New World paved the way for The Little People to colonize it. But unlike back then, the colonies of the future won't have the ethical problem of displacing natives to worry about.

If Bezos and Musk and such don't care about little people, it doesn't matter, so long as they develop the tech that allows the little people to colonize the universe.

Not a very good analogy - who were the little people they got to work on the plantations? The technology that allowed empires to spread across the globe has not allowed people to escape their own nature; that always follows along. It'll follow us into space.

Maybe robots can do the labour this time (and unlike Bezos' Amazon 'fulfilment centre' workers, they don't need pee breaks) but if so, why should capital investment be wasted building vast habitats for superfluous people who do not produce revenue? Anyone who could build a colony of that type wouldn't need to and wouldn't be able to justify the vast infrastructure that would be necessary to their investors.

We could build bigger pyramids for new Pharaohs or Boullée's Newton Cenotaph but we don't. The construction that we do on that scale now is utilitarian and still fails if it doesn't survive by producing a return. Extraterrestrial settlement may happen, but more likely through multitudinous small units, not megalomaniacal follies.

 

[Orionblamblam]

Not a very good analogy - who were the little people they got to work on the plantations? Today's technology has not allowed people to escape their own natures. That always follows along. Maybe robots can do the labour this time but if so, why should capital investment be wasted building vast habitats for superfluous people who do not produce revenue? Anyone who could build a colony of that type would't need to.

Once the technology is available for the rich folk, someone will make buckets of money making it available to the middle class. Witness the billion-dollar supercomputer in your pocket. What was the 1940's business case for giving teenagers access to computational technology more powerful and advanced by many orders of magnitude than what the Allies had? None.

What will be needed are propulsion, power, production. A "Mr. Fusion" and a desktop replicator will buy you the universe. We don't have those. But when I was a kid, the idea of 3D printing *organs* was ridiculous sci-fi. With that tech, you could send a single robot to an asteroid to do its thing, and when you finally show up yourself a couple years later it has turned it into a habitat. More robots, more faster; bigger robots, more faster. But something as affordable as a modern car or a house should be adequate to make good sized habs. What you want are habs in the kilometers scale, but habs in the hundred-meter scale will open the universe.

Robots that build robots that build habitats do not require massive budgets, they just need resources and time.

 

[Rhinocrates]

I have computers more powerful than any that existed in WWII, but they're not more powerful than anyone else's now. They haven't given me absolute freedom or even an advantage. In fact, they've made me dependent on Microsoft and they go wherever I go.

At least you mentioned economics. If space is a competitive environment and not controlled by a unitary authority, then there will be competition and limits to resources - those limits being whatever relative advantage one has over one's competitors. These limits will manifest as selection pressures. Time is one of them and a launch window at a particular location and time and the time taken to follow an orbit to a resource node will have values. If space settlement follows earthly colonisation in any way, time will be a commodity, there will be futures markets and bubbles (which tend to burst - look up 'South Seas Bubble'). One person's self-replicating robot is another person's claim-jumper, or pirate, or worse (see below).

A few facts have become clear in recent decades: First, the bulk of commerce is now in virtual services, i.e. rent. Yanis Varoufakis has recently published an analysis of this shift. John Gray, coming from his own corner, likewise sees a shift to quasi-feudal rent-based power. My computers happen to be a good example of that. I can't buy a 'thing' called Word. Instead, Microsoft has figured out that they can keep charging me via subscription. The post-industrial age is the age of rent, exemplified by Amazon. Amazon makes nothing itself, instead, as Varoufakis points out, it charges rent from both the consumers who buy the goods and from the makers of those goods to transport them to the consumers. Meanwhile, look what's happened to local bookstores. Of course most of Amazon's revenue isn't even in shipping books and coffee mugs; it's in computing services and intellectual property (and the computers providing those services are as far ahead of my pitiful desktop, laptop and phone as they are over ENIAC - so where's my advantage?). Mr Fusion and the self replicating robots will be IP, the software running them will be IP, what they make will be subject to royalties.

Want to send a self-replicating bot to an asteroid so that you can live in splendid isolation? Sorry, that's asteroid's already part of someone's futures trust. You're claim jumping and you can expect a letter from Sue, Grabbit, and Run immediately for infringing on future profits. Use ChatGPT to make your own software and movies? Storms are already brewing over that. So far we've just heard about writers and actors threatened by AI. Artists and writers are already suing over their work and likenesses being used to train AIs and their output. The standard for copyright law is a demonstrable resemblance, so I see legal tempests coming soon from the big media companies holding on to their franchises because someone's AI has 'stolen' memes without paying for them. Legally, IP is now more real than mere dirt.

This isn't the capitalism or colonialism of past centuries.

The second main emergent fact is that just as anything can be monetised, anything can be a weapon, as two current wars are showing. Cute little drones are weapons, paragliders are weapons. As Putin knows, grain is a weapon, gas and oil are weapons, displaced people are weapons. So what is a self-replicating robot out in the asteroid belt doing? On the asteroid that I've been selling futures in, I might point out. Moreover, self-replicating tech, like smallpox, is not something you want to let loose anyway. Potentially it's a WMD and today a potential weapon is a weapon. The mere capability to use it is leverage. Best to sue first and shoot missiles next.

The point is that tech is distinguishable from magic. Only wizards have magic but anyone else can have technology. It only becomes akin to magic when its in the hands of a few as a massive relative advantage and the trickle-up of rent will make sure of that.

Finally, if you can run, then you can be followed. It's never been easier and there's no stealth in space.

 

[Rhinocrates]

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qAkZT_4vL_Y