SINE

When we were at Biosphere, I was not so sure they switched. There is no difference between learning how to live one planet different from another planet. We have the same requirements wherever we live. Gradually maybe Aura will learn this too. Like her hero Soleri who is making a condensed city on earth Aura likes. He is no different. A year after we met, Aura and I saw a play at Arcosanti on the way to Biosphere that I wanted see. In this play, the Roman emperor Caesar gets murdered, and one murderer was a close confidante, Brutus. Caesar says: et tu, Brute? Which I think is French language for “And you? Brutus” because he was so shocked his friend would do this to him. This is why I say Et tu, Soleri? Because here is Aura, thinking back on beautiful concerts at Arcosanti which she saw as the answer to people spreading all over the desert and earth to stay in tight communities so they could go out and enjoy the wide open landscape when they want to. She had no idea Soleri was designing artificial moons for people to live in like big spaceships much bigger than Space Station that’s up there now. It’s like her hero is traitor like she must have thought of me for awhile too, I guess, thinking about living at other places besides earth. You have to read almost to the end of Soleri’s book, chapter 29, to see what he says about this, but he was designing man-made worlds like Biosphere for a long time before Biosphere started. Click on the link Asteromo to see some of his drawings. Interesting man. Listen to this piece from his book. Wait: I get Aura. - Aura.

AURA

Wait a minute.

SINE

I having trouble reading this. Some of the words . . .

AURA

What is this?

SINE

Paolo Soleri, the Arcosanti man.

AURA

Okay. Where do I start? Okay.

Asteromo – City in space

Asteromo – City in space?

SINE

Yeah. Right there.

AURA

Well, okay.

Paolo Soleri, The City in the Image of Man (Cambridge: MIT, 1969), p. 117:

"There is then a profitable ground for learning about the cities of today by reflecting on the hypothetical and as-yet-unreal city-asteroid."

Soleri wrote this?

"For it the conditions are harsher, the problems more packaged, the survival-success story more elemental, and the hypothesis slightly less human than one might desire. However, what is built in is not so much the fraud of simulation as the frugality of investigation.

"Lunacy is part of man’s burden. Thus, while man dies on earth through hunger and malice, he works feverishly at the encounter with the black naught of space. He will need out there a real machine for living. Man and his earthly morphological confinement is a dead duck in space. He will be stuffed into a superlung, wrapped by superdigestive tracts, governed by superchemical brains. He will not look into the crystal ball; he will be inside it. Life will be interiorized, not psychologically but physically: the life inside, not the life on (the earth). The center or the axis of the machine will be the center of gravity. Man’s head will point at it, not his feet."

Is he nuts or what?

"Should man take with him out there, beside his biological condition, anything else that has a biological flavor? He may have to, while nurturing his expectation for a non-biological self. He may have to for his physical and mental health. Miniaturization is the password to the fantastic voyage. For a long time symbolism will be the real context of space life, the testing of events to come and not necessarily of space events but of more pressing earthly problems - the miniaturization of the performance of the human race on the space ship earth.

"Asteromo is an asteroid for a population of about 70,000 people. It is basically a double-skin cylinder kept inflated by pressurization and rotation on its main axis. The inner skin is the ground on which man walks."

Whose idea is this?

"It is lined with vegetation for food and the carbon dioxide-oxygen cycle. (Unknowingly I arrived at somewhere between 10 and 20 square meters of garden per person, the same order of magnitude considered by the Russian space scientists.)"

Oh for Pete’s sake.

SINE

No. Paolo.

AURA

It’s gotta be the tourists, running back and forth to Biosphere. This is insane. - Let’s just stay at Phantom Ranch.

SINE

I think I prefer Mars over Asteromo. But Phantom Ranch good, too, so long as you there Aura.

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