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:
“Out of the earth to rest or range
Perpetual in perpetual change,
The unknown passing through the strange.”
—John Masefield (1878–1967)
“Russian forests crash down under the axe, billions of trees are dying, the habitations of animals and birds are layed waste, rivers grow shallow and dry up, marvelous landscapes are disappearing forever.... Man is endowed with creativity in order to multiply that which has been given him; he has not created, but destroyed. There are fewer and fewer forests, rivers are drying up, wildlife has become extinct, the climate is ruined, and the earth is becoming ever poorer and uglier.”
—Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (1860–1904)
“Do you know the balancings of the clouds, the wondrous works of the one whose knowledge is perfect, you whose garments are hot when the earth is still because of the south wind? Can you, like him, spread out the skies, hard as a molten mirror?”
—Bible: Hebrew, Job 37:16-18.
One of Job’s “comforters,” of God.