Skygardens

This article was in the New York Times today. While I'm a little skeptical about the feasability of this project (real estate costs would seem to make it unprofitable) I always enjoy reading about ideas like this if for no other reason than their ability to push the mind past accepted conventions. Just as we never notice the changes in loved ones until a long absence, so we can never really notice the changes in our world because repeated daily exposure to it makes everything seem vaguely familiar. Yet just as the generation who came of age in the 1980s couldn't conceive of the blackberry toting, ipod listening, wikipedia-using lifestyle of today, so there will much in the next twenty years that we can't even imagine, and yet when it occurs will feel utterly ordinary. While the 2020s might not bring skygardens, it will bring changes of equally stunning magnitude when considered from a distance of 15 or 20 years in the past, and visionaries who consider these changes are always a welcome escape from the conventionality of the present.

This is a video of Dr. Despommier on CNN: