Thursday Things: Flying Future Edition
30 June 2022. Vol 4 No 26 By Dan McGirt. #151
Welcome to Thursday Things! If you enjoy this edition, please click the heart icon in the header or at the end of the post to let me know. You can post a comment by clicking the dialog bubble.
The past is also scenic. Photo by Ricardo Resende on Unsplash
Die Hard 12: Die Higher. You know what they say about what things that go up must do. This movie writes itself. Inside giant flying luxury hotel that can stay in the air for years
A giant nuclear-powered ‘flying hotel’, complete with a gym and swimming pool is set to carry 5,000 passengers in unparalleled luxury.
A new CGI video details how the AI-piloted Sky Cruise plans to remain airborne for months at a time, while also docking to take on new passengers, or to drop off anyone board.
The futuristic hybrid between a plane and hotel – which has 20 engines powered by nuclear fusion – is designed never to land.
Hashem Alghaili, who created the incredibly detailed mockup of the monster aircraft, says the nuclear-powered sky cruise “could be the future of transport”.
Designed to run 24/7, Alghaili even adds that running repairs would be carried out in-flight – a first in aviation.
And, when asked how many people it would take to fly this gigantic plane, he said: “All this technology and you still want pilots?
“I believe it will be fully autonomous”.
Right? Just read everything in the excerpt above, assume it goes wrong, add John McClain, Jr., and there’s your plot.
No, wait! Let’s up the stakes:
The huge aeroplane would have issues taking off, and would be far from aerodynamic. Others also pointed out faults with its weight, saying that if an aircraft powered by a nuclear reactor crashed, it could destroy a city.
It would be a great action flick. But if they ever build this thing it is not a hotel I’ll be checking into, I assure you.
Some have called the Sky Cruise concept the ‘new Titanic‘, pointing out a plethora of issues with its design.
More like Skytanic.
Aliens. Gotta be. It’s always aliens. Eerie Figures With Giant Heads Found Painted in a Rock Shelter in Tanzania
The giraffe knows it’s aliens. Source: A diagram of the artwork. (M. Grzelczyk, Antiquity, 2021)
In 2018, archaeologists made a staggering discovery in Swaga Swaga Game Reserve in central Tanzania: 52 previously undocumented rock shelters, deliberately painted with rock art. Weathering had mostly destroyed all but a handful; but of those that were preserved, one was an absolute enigma.
The site, named Amak'hee 4, was elaborately painted with a frieze of figurative art – including three mysterious, anthropomorphic figures with extremely oversized heads.
These could be, according to archaeologist Maciej Grzelczyk of the Jagiellonian University in Poland, a clue to figuring out what other, similar trios of figures found in other rock art panels might be.
The Amak'hee 4 panel is difficult to date, but in 2021 Grzelczyk was able to gauge that it's at least a few hundred years old. It's painted almost entirely in red pigment, except for five figures in white.
The weathering on this pigment, and the absence of domestic animals, suggests that it's fairly old, dating back to the time of hunter-gatherer societies in the region.
Perhaps dating back to a time when visitors of extraterrestrial origin posed for portraits drawn by primitive artists? You can read the article for the explanations of conventional archaeologists that somehow don’t involve aliens. But come on — we all know it’s aliens.
Read what science wants you to think here: Amak'hee 4: a newly documented rock art site in the Swaga Swaga Game Reserve, Antiquity , Volume 95 , Issue 379 , February 2021
Back to the retro future. As long as we’re thinking of strange alien visitors and impossible sky hotels, we may as well go straight to the source for imagining fantastic futures that never were and likely never will be.
Revisit Vintage Issues of Astounding Stories, the 1930s Magazine that Gave Rise to Science Fiction as We Know It
Having been putting out issues for 92 years now, Analog Science Fiction and Fact stands as the longest continuously published magazine of its genre. It also lays claim to having developed or at least popularized that genre in the form we know it today. When it originally launched in December of 1929, it did so under the much more whiz-bang title of Astounding Stories of Super-Science. But only three years later, after a change of ownership and the installation as editor of F. Orlin Tremaine, did the magazine begin publishing work by writers remembered today as the defining minds of science fiction.
I have a particular fascination with the future as seen from the past. I love reading old books or articles predicting what the future will be like in the far distant year 1980. Or 2001. Or the amazing year 2020, when everything will be awesome and we’ll all have flying cars, robot butlers, and eat entire meals in miraculous food pills! All diseases will be cured, the world will live in peace, and we’ll have fun on our atomic roller skates! And, of course, everything will be Art Deco style.
Looks like the Sky Hotel didn’t quite make it…
Even if you don’t want to read the stories, the illustrations, especially the cover art, from these old science fiction magazines are amazing, even astounding, and evocative of our dreams of the future.
Now, here in the once science-fictional-sounding twenty-first century, you can not only behold the covers but read the pages of hundreds of issues of Astounding Stories from the thirties, forties, and fifties online. The earliest volumes are available to download at the University of Pennsylvania’s web site, by way of Project Gutenberg, and there are even more of them free to read at the Internet Archive.
Have a look! And may your future be bright.
Thank you for reading Thursday Things! Again, please click the hearts, leave a comment, and use the share feature to send this issue to a friend who might enjoy it. See you next Thursday!