2076-03-07 Not What They Seem

We are no longer limited to what occurs naturally.

If you nail together two things that have never been nailed together before, some schmuck will buy it from you.—George Carlin

I love the weird bits of life today. Everything from eating utensils to landscapes can, and often does, have elements of fantasy. That keeps things interesting, when a life that is too easy or predictable might lead to boredom.

The flowers, for one thing. Any color or pattern you can imagine, and some botanical artist has bred or genetically engineered it. Flowerbeds and window boxes are a riot of shapes and colors, and in all seasons. It's just as easy to gengineer cold-hardiness, salt tolerance, or wind-resistant stalks as it is to tweak a petal's color scheme. The tools we developed for food plants, out of necessity, have been applied to flowers for aesthetics. Not that everyone has refined good taste.

Most manufactured surfaces look like something they are not. That marble bench, for instance, actually feels like memory foam when you sit on it. But a foam cushion would not match the classic Greek style of the monopteros, would it?

Light, strong, flexible, rigid—whatever attributes you need, we can design the material. We are no longer limited to what occurs naturally. Whatever surface appearance you want can be added without affecting the structural integrity. That's important because most of what we build today is built from the most common materials. Glass from silica, carbon fiber from, well, everything—we will never run out of those materials. We can recycle and conserve rarer elements, but it's usually easier to figure out how to build something with more common elements. A metal-looking skin over a carbon fiber structure can be more aesthetically pleasing, so why not?

You want to live in a castle floating in the sky? That can be arranged. You want your live-aboard boat to mimic a 17th-century galleon? No problem. But neither will ever sink or catch fire, and each will power itself from sunlight and wind.

More than one airborne community powers and feeds itself without ever touching land, floating high above storms and drifting all over the globe. Not a few of the air-born pride themselves on never having set foot on Earth.

But none of that would have been possible if the bureaucrats had had their way.