Random Thought of the Day

[mbarrick]

As the Skytrain rolled past the 1960's concrete towers near Lougheed Mall I started thinking about how these buildings were the inspiration for the apartments-on-stalks in the Jetsons. It's a matter of extrapolation: the car park takes up the first few floors and the upper floors are the more desirable apartments. Why bother building the lower floors at all if no-one wants to live in them? And with the flying cars in the context of 1960's car-culture you no longer have the need for the ground-level parking and entrance - obviously people would simply fly in and out of the upper floors directly and never need to walk anywhere.

So then I started thinking about what life would be like in the Jetsons future for people who weren't Vice Presidents at Spacely Sprokets or their whiny, privileged, bleach-blond daughters? What of all the poor sods put out of work by Rosie the robot maid and her ilk? What miserable life would they be living down on the surface, forgotten below these unassailable towers of bourgeois privilege? Would miserable shanty villages be huddled up against the bases of the towers to tap into what little heat and power could be gleaned off the service shaft? Would their inhabitants survive off the cast-offs from the ten thousand slovenly, video-game addicted, overweight Elroy's above? Between the tower bases would there be the hollowed out, abandoned shells of closed businesses that once thrived on pedestrian traffic? What horrors lurk beneath the world of George and Jane Jetson?

Comments

[robbat2.livejournal.com]

Clarke (IIRC), and a few other sci-fi writers always described shanty towns that would grow up around space elevators, in a similiar fashion.

[http://users.livejournal.com/_disdain_/]

In answer to this I am reminded of the workers who lived beneath the surface in Metropolis (http://imdb.com/title/tt0017136/).

[mbarrick.livejournal.com]

...He says to a man living in Rotwang's Lab (http://mbarrick.livejournal.com/474683.html).

[mediavictim.livejournal.com]

Maybe its a wasteland of the mangled remains of the flying cars that ran out of fuel or the corpses of men who plummeted to the ground

Now given the exhause of those flying cars (and its not water vapor from hydrogen fuel or we would see more clouds ) its probably completely smoggy since gravity would pull the smog down.

Also considering that there is no high winds to sway the structures
and the air is not too thin to brethe they must be a low altitude - just abouve the smog - but still close enough to look down on the ground dwellers.

the hardest work anyone has to do is push a button - but there are not enough solar pannels to power all their machines - this means that there are probably fossil fuel, nuclear or solar plants below (however the smog from the card would eliminate the possibility of solar pannels on the ground) So there are probably power plants in an industrial wasteland of fallen things from the sky