Is This A Good Idea : Science Channel

September 09, 2011

After Hurricane Irene knocked out my electricity for several days, I found myself once again joining the ranks of what Gawker disparages as "Laptop Hobos " — i.e., the unwashed, shabbily clad, backpack-toting, perpetually cranky nomads who roam from coffee shop to coffee shop in quest of a vacant three-prong outlet, and free and/or unsecured WiFi connections. We then proceed to nurse a tall latte for six hours while greedily sucking up our daily data fix. It was bracing to see how quickly my fellow hobos and I descended psychologically into a state of squalid, covetous combativeness, shooting hostile glares at anyone who dared to remain plugged in after their LED recharging indicators were no longer flashing, and forging impromptu alliances to protect the most strategically advantageous tables from outside marauders while we took turns scurrying to the bathroom. Except for the lack of face paint and bamboo to fashion spears, we would have made William Golding's marooned English schoolboys in Lord of the Flies seem like Habitat for Humanity volunteers by comparison.

"Laptop hobos" find refuge from disaster - and free WIFI - at neighborhood coffee shops.

Ancient People Couldn't Camp Out at Starbucks

Even more unsettling was how little it took to trigger this transformation. Hurricane Irene was a mere Category 1 hurricane, with nowhere near the ferocity of Katrina back in 2005. But the apocalyptic frenzy that it nevertheless inspired up and down the East Coast, coming as it did in the wake of a similar freak-out about a 5.8 earthquake in rural Virginia, got me to thinking about a curious paradox. The more technologically advanced our information-age culture becomes, the less able we are, psychically at least, to cope with disruptions caused when nature asserts itself. Remember that people in ancient times suffered through vastly larger, truly horrifying disasters -- massive floods, plagues of locusts, and so on — and had little understanding of what was happening to them, let alone any preparations or technology to help them. Nevertheless, they didn't come anywhere near as unhinged as we do. In Pliny the Younger's eyewitness account of the volcanic destruction of Pompeii in A.D. 79, for example, huddled residents watching the black cloud towering over the city were so terrified that:

Many besought the aid of the gods, but still more imagined there were no gods left, and that the universe was plunged into eternal darkness for evermore.

But the Romans managed as best they could, tying pillows around their heads in a vain effort to protect themselves from the shower of hot ashes descending upon them from the sky. There aren't any accounts of them complaining about their inability to watch HBO or microwave a frozen burrito, or getting into angry confrontations with countrymen who were hogging the electrical outlets at Starbucks to charge their smart phones. In contrast, as we become more and more accustomed to -- or rather, dependent upon -- the instantaneous gratification provided by our gadgetry and conveniences, the more helpless, impatient and insufferably bitchy we become. We just love our artificial bubble of creature comforts too much.

Climate-Controlled Comfort 365 Days a Year

That's why I'm thinking that the best solution for postmodern humans may be to transform that bubble into a real one and insulate ourselves totally from the disruptive effects of nature. We could accomplish this by building immense domes over our towns and cities, which would protect us from the forces of nature and also enable us to live in air-conditioned, temperature- controlled 24-7, 365-days-a-year comfort.

I can sense that some of you are going to have some hesitancy about this solution. After all, when Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans in 2005, the storm's fury actually peeled the roof off the Superdome, the massive enclosed stadium in which many of the city's impoverished residents had sought refuge. And others among you remember the concept of domed cities being lampooned mercilessly in The Simpsons Movie, in which the inhabitants of Springfield were confined inside a dome by the Environmental Protection Agency, after Homer illegally dumped his pet pig's doo-doo in a nearby lake. But not to worry. The sort of gigantic domes that I'm envisioning would be a lot more resilient, hardened against natural forces, and hospitable to boot.

Hurricane Katrina peeled the roof from the Superdome.

Bucky Fuller Planned to Dome Manhattan

As usual, enclosing cities in domes is not a totally new idea, though it has evolved gradually over many centuries. Humans began building small domes from mammoth bones to use as dwellings in prehistoric times, gradually progressing to using wood and brick. In the second century, the emperor Hadrian built Rome's spectacular Pantheon, a temple to the gods which even today remains the world's largest unreinforced concrete dome. Circa 1797, Samuel Taylor Coleridge smoked opium and fantasized that the 13th- century Mongol emperor Kublai Khan had ordered construction of a giant dome in his summer capital, Xanadu, a structure the poet described in his poem "Kubla Khan" (There's no evidence the emperor actually did build Xanadu, though he certainly built plenty of other trippy stuff.) In the late 19th century, numerous visionaries -- including Britain's William Delisle Hay, author of the infamous white-supremacist sci-fi opus Three Hundred Years Hence, envisioned humans living in enclosed communities underground and beneath the sea. Eventually, someone -- it's not clear precisely who -- imagined putting indoor cities in domes on the surface instead. In "Cosmic Menace," a 1931 short story published in Amazing Stories, A.W. Bernal envisions future domed metropolises on both Earth and other planets.

It wasn't until the 1960s, when people first began to worry in earnest that our species was rapidly befouling its own habitat with pollution and endangering its future existence, that some began to talk seriously about actually building domed cities to protect us from our own filth. Architect-inventor-futurist Buckminster Fuller proposed enclosing Manhattan in an air-conditioned clear dome that would rise a mile above street level. (He suggested that the structure would pay for itself in a decade by eliminating the expense of snow removal.) Fuller, of course, was partial to a particular innovation in dome building -- the geodesic dome, invented in the 1920s by Walter Bausersfeld, which was constructed of interlocking triangles to give it more strength and resilience.

In this 1967 Associated Press article, Northwestern University engineering professor William L. Garrison sketches out an even more elaborate vision for glass-domed "experimental cities" that would eliminate the need for automobiles by providing moving sidewalks and cargo conveyor belts similar to the people movers in today's airports. (In another resource-conserving measure that my 12-year-old son would appreciate, Garrison proposed replacing schools with home-based television classes.)

Geodesic domes were a space-age fad of the mid-1900s.

In the decades that followed, dome mania died down a bit, only to resurface in recent years. In 2009, an episode of the Discovery Channel program Mega Engineering suggested putting the city of Houston under a giant hurricane-resistant dome. The proposed structure would tower 1.2 miles in the air, have a surface area of 21 million square feet, and be composed of nearly 150,000 panels.

Utopian Snow Globes?

Creating a city-sized dome would present some mind-boggling engineering challenges. It would not only have to support its own weight and expand and contract to cope with the heat of the sun, but it would also have to withstand gargantuan stresses caused by rain, snow and ice, and wind. Nevertheless, some think the idea is doable, given the development of super-lightweight, super-resilient building materials such as the German-made air-filled plastic pillows used to construct Astana, Kazakhstan's Khan Shatyr, which is essentially the world's largest tent. And here's a Web page about the SPANTHEON structural system, patented in 2010, which is designed to enable city-sized domes to distribute weight and other forces in an optimal manner. The site envisions enclosed "evergreen cities" with pollution-free controlled climates that would be pretty much self-sustaining, producing their own food from rooftop farms and siphoning rainwater runoff for drinking and irrigation. The entire city would be powered and heated by geothermal energy, which in theory would be highly efficient because the enclosure would prevent energy loss. Excess carbon dioxide would be absorbed by strategically planted sections of flora that would stay green year- round.

As the SPANTHEON website preaches:

The need is urgent to prepare for erecting giant cities virtually overnight, in order to relocate entire societies escaping from severe air pollution, volcanic eruptions, rising ocean levels, earthquakes, floods and other disasters. This preparation should start now.

I would be remiss if I didn't note that this notion of utopia inside a snow globe, assuming that it is architecturally, technologically and economically feasible, still might have a few downsides. Since a domed city would have finite population capacity and resources, those of you who dream of an ideal world fueled by largely unrestrained personal autonomy, along the lines of Ayn Rand's objectivism, are going to be sorely disappointed. To the contrary, life within a dome would require extensive central planning, stringent enforcement of rules and restrictions, and some degree of sacrificing personal freedoms and the right to dissent to make things run smoothly. Imagine your local suburban homeowners association on steroids, and possibly equipped with jackboots and Tasers. Additionally, population growth inevitably would become as serious of a concern as it was in the dystopian society depicted in the 1976 sci-fi flick Logan's Run, which came up with the macabre solution of terminating everyone who reached the age of 30.

On the other hand, we wouldn't have to worry about storms knocking out our electricity and depriving us of our precious gadgets.

So what do you think? Express your opinion below.

Image Credits: Mike Kepka/San Francisco Chronicle/Corbis | David J. Phillip/Pool/Reuters/Corbis | Alan Band/Keystone/Getty Images