After months of C-19, I’m surprised I haven’t heard a single mention of Vernor Vinge’s space-opera A Fire Upon the Deep. For the aliens in it (‘Tines’) an ‘individual’ is made up of several big ferret-like things entwined together, each of which is parts of a single mind that ‘thinks’ by ultrasound. The relevance? Tine-group have to social-distance to avoid hearing each other’s cross-talk, which drives them insane, like if you had snippets of others’ minds wired into your own. And — this is classic Vinge — the resulting need for vast, sparsely inhabited interior spaces slowed their civilization’s development. Imagine if humans had always needed spaces on the scale of Amazon fulfillment centers — pretty hard to build them using, say, medieval masonry techniques. Of course, everyone’s been thinking in the short term about C-19: flattening curves, vaccines any day now, when it all magically goes away. But it’s endemic now, and we need to take a longer view. We already have layer after layer of obsolete architectural forms, from the marble monuments to capital that once were “banks” to thousands of malls that were pretty derelict before C-19 came along. And we’re starting to see how many of our most basic architectural forms — high-rises that rely on elevators, schools that rely on crowding, integrated lifestyle developments, buildings that force people to enter and exit through the same apertures — could be hopelessly inadequate in an age of pandemics. If C-19 doesn’t go away, or if it develops a resistant mutation (unlikely, imo, fwiw), or if another pandemic comes along, it’s easy to see how places like Manhattan — dense, tall urban cores — would become uninhabitable. If architects and planners haven’t figured this out yet (I’m sure many are on it), then finance — say, bond underwriters and reinsurers — are busy doing the math. Those actuaries keep a low profile, but the impact of their decisions is incalculable. I’m thinking the future will be much flatter, and more and more of it will look like IKEA: a single, prescribed path.Jul 23, 2020 3:41:21 am