Ambition can be a wonderful thing, provided it stays within the boundaries of reality. Bold visions have given us some amazing things – the Great Wall, the Panama Canal, the Large Hadron Collider, the Chunnel, and so on. We never would have reached the stars if we hadn't been willing to take a giant leap. And surely plenty of folks thought we were crazy to try. Those doubters were proven wrong. Maybe this proposed project will be like that...
This might sound like pie in the sky, but Clouds Architecture Office has unveiled plans for a tower that would be suspended from an asteroid orbiting 50,000 km above the Earth's surface.
Analemma Tower, as they call it, would be the "tallest" ever built and would include residential space, office space, shopping, entertainment, and even worship space.
These are serious, if speculative, plans. The artwork and drawings they've released refer to NASA's plan to capture and relocate an asteroid in 2021.
Mind you, that mission is no longer included in its most recent budget, so that's up in the air. Nevertheless, the idea for Clouds would be to trap an asteroid in orbit, dangle a huge, high-strength cable from it, and build the tower around it.
Analemma Tower would be placed in an eccentric orbit, moving between the Northern and Southern hemispheres in a figure-8 pattern that loops daily.
Given its extraordinary height, the top of the tower would receive 42 more minutes of daylight than the bottom. Space-based solar panels would power the tower, and water would be captured from clouds and rainwater and then filtered and recycled.
The plans only call for the tower itself to extend 32 km up, which still takes it above the troposphere.
The planners reasonably noted that "we realized that there is probably a tangible height limit beyond which people would not tolerate living due to the extreme conditions."
Clearly there are still a ton of questions around these plans, but hey, how would you like to have an office above the clouds?
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