The Daily Croissant

"Each year, the United Kingdom raises and kills around 800 million broiler chickens for their meat. These creatures are grown in vast sheds with no natural light over the course of six to seven weeks. They are bred to grow particularly quickly and often die because their hearts and lungs cannot keep up with their body’s rapid growth.

Architecture student André Ford has proposed a new system for the mass production of chickens that removes the birds’ cerebral cortex so that they don’t experience the horrors of being packed together tightly in vertical farms.

After this “desensitization,” the chickens could then be stacked into huge urban farms with around 1,000 chickens hooked up to large vertical frames — a little like the network of pods the humans are connected to in The Matrix. The feet of the chickens would also be removed in order to pack more in. There could be dozens of these frames in the vertical farming system, which Ford refers to as the Centre for Unconscious Farming . Food, water and air would be delivered via a network of tubes and excrement would be removed in the same way. This technique could achieve a density of around 11.7 chickens per cubic meter instead of the current 3.2 chickens achieved in broiler houses."

"The next step up from hydroponics is the orbital space farm, as envisaged by artist Frank Tinsley in 1954. The great coils you see in the giant dish contain chlorella algae; the wonder food of Future Past that was, along with yeast, supposed to replace bread as the staple of all mankind. 

Back in the 1950s, this didn't seem like such a crazy idea. On paper, chlorella looked like a winner. Not only was the microorganism 50 percent protein with the complete set of amino acids, but it was also chock full of calories, fats and vitamins. Furthermore, all you needed to grow it was sunshine, water and carbon dioxide. And it grew in incredible quantities with one pilot plant projecting yields of 40 tons of dry weight protein per acre. At this rate, a farm the size of Rhode Island would feed the entire planet and cultivating one fifth of the Earth's surface would not only provide food, but all of the fuels needed for every major industry on the planet. All that needed to be overcome were "minor technical difficulties."...

"This project envisions a distinct approach towards moving around the United States being also a revival of the act of traveling. Why traveling at high speed? Why having the final destiny always defined? And why always departing and arriving on a tight schedule? Nowadays, everything is set and everyone is always running around. It is time to reconsider the act of traveling and start enjoying it accordingly.

The Passing Cloud is an innovative and environmentally friendly method of transportation that doesn’t require expensive steel tracks or concrete highways. It is made of a series of spherical balloons that form the shape of a cloud. Its inner stainless steel structure is covered with heavy weight tensile nylon fabric. During the journey, it moves according to prevailing winds speed and direction at the time of travel. Since it moves with the wind, no wind is ever felt during the trip, offering the passengers a full “floating sensation”."

click image to enlarge

The farm of the 21st century as predicted by Thomas Midgley in a 1935 address to the American Chemical Society. I don't know what's worse; horses with droppings the size of Volkswagens or a soft-boiled egg that takes a week to eat.

And you thought GM crops were a worry.

"Creating Lakes in the Desert: A Proposal for Creating a Network of Canals and Exploring New Ways to Inhabit Our Planet  

The Desert Aqua-Net Plan is a concept for making use of the desert, which currently accounts for some one-third of the Earth's total land area.

According to this idea, multiple manmade lakes will be created in depressed areas of deserts, after which artificial islands will be built on the lakes. Filled with seawater introduced through canals, the lakes will then be connected to form a water network.

By creating waterways in the desert and transforming arid and semiarid areas into inhabitable land, this plan (which is still in the simulation stage) ultimately seeks to build cities on manmade islands that have been formed on seawater lakes."

"In the year 2005, helicopters will yank trees out of the ground like so many daisies. The pilots try not to think about slamming back into the ground when a particularly tough pine refuses to give way. How does he know which one's to yank? Because the advance team has pumped them so full of radioactive isotopes that they set off a Geiger counter five hundred feet in the air.  

Try not to think about it."

Architecture on a dramatic scale... Cities the size of mountains.

Whatever happened to the future? It's still around, of course, mostly in Europe and Japan, but over the years the Fantastic World of Tomorrow's gotten ... cheaper, simpler, and -- most tragically of all -- the future's gotten too damned small.

Luckily there are a few visionaries left who aren't frightened of a future that doesn't fit in your pocket, a tomorrow with a vast scope, a monstrously dramatic scale, a time of awe-inspiring dimensions: they've dared to look over the horizon and visualize a truly big tomorrow.

This article is written by author M. Christian (from "Meine kleine fabrik").

"However, to run the farm of tomorrow requires more than beast or muscle. You need the atom.

One of the forgotten promises of the nascent Atomic Age was that the incredibly cheap, limitless power of the atom would revolutionise farming by irrigating vast areas of desert until the Sahara became a second Eden, Death Valley rivaled the great prairie states and the Gobi desert turned green and abolished the threat of famine from Asia for all time

Furthermore, radioactive isotopes would play their part by introducing radioactive tracers to enhance agricultural science and the development of artificial atomic mutation to produce new crops.

Score: Zero for the atomic irrigation, plus ten for the isotopes, and minus several million for the mutants-- if you count Peter Graves's tiny error in judgment."