Earth
In Jonathan Swift's satirical novel Gulliver's Travels, Swift envisioned Laputa, an island city that floated in the sky. The island was suggested to levitate above the Earth by use of the force of magnetism. In the 1920s, Hugo Gernsback speculated about floating cities of the future, suggesting that 10,000 years hence "the city the size of New York will float several miles above the surface of the earth, where the air is cleaner and purer and free from disease carrying bacteria." To stay in the air, "four gigantic generators will shoot earthward electric rays which by reaction with the earth produce the force to keep the city aloft."
Laputa (although uninhabited) is shown in Hayao Miyazaki's Castle in the Sky.
Although Swift's proposal was intended as satire, Buckminster Fuller proposed the concept more seriously in the form of the Cloud nine (Tensegrity sphere) megastructure, in which he envisioned structural spheres that float freely in the sky, allowing passengers a migratory lifestyle and a solution to the depletion of Earth's resources. He proposed a 1-mile-diameter (1.6 km) geodesic sphere that would be heated by sunlight, functioning as a thermal airship.
Read more about this topic: Floating City (science Fiction)
Famous quotes containing the word earth:
“The earth is ready, the time is ripe, for the authoritative expression of the feminine as well as the masculine interpretation of that common social consensus which is slowly writing justice in the State and fraternity in the social order.”
—Anna Garlin Spencer (1851–1931)
“Nothing on earth more would I have,
Save that I have, to have it still.”
—Sir Thomas Wyatt (1503?–1542)
“Married love is a stream that, after a certain length of time, sinks into the earth and flows underground. Something is there, but one does not know what. Only the vegetation shows that there is still water.”
—Gerald Branan (1894–1987)