The Fredösphere

Gravity Lens found a "retro-eye-candy-filled trailer" for a documentary called Future By Design.  It's the story of futurist Jacque Fresco, an old-tyme social engineer who worked on the grandest possible scale.  Imagine Le Corbusier with more curves and less timidity.  These guys are the Trotskyites of the design world:  their hubris would frighten if only we could find a way to take them seriously.  That's impossible, because we now understand the extreme limits under which top-down social planning operates.  It frightens, because implicit in these clean drawings of stylistically-consistent cities of the future is vast destruction -- every mansard roof and Gothic ornament and faux-mediæval spire must fall before the wrecking ball.  Ouch.

"As long as you have war, police, prisons, crime, you are in the early stages of civilization."  Or for that matter, as long as you have humans.  I suppose the answer to that is:  bring on the post-humans!

"The answers of yesterday are no longer relevant."  Wow.  I did not know that.

I guess my paranoid streak is getting out of control.  Fresco (what a name for a futurist!  Did he make it up?) admits himself his models are conceptual -- mere guesswork.  The poor guy was simply born too soon.  Were this a hundred years from now, we could give him a planet or two to terraform and develop to his heart's content, far from any established human settlement.  In fact, we need a few of these nuts around; occasionally, one stumbles onto something really good.

There's more about the documentary here.  Also, see the Venus Project.  Dig those bisected oblate spheroids!  They sure beat utt-bugly grids.