Scientific American December 1997 [antikvár]

From the EditorsBuilding ExcitementOne of the most popular children's videos of recent years had no singing dinosaurs, spaceships, talking dogs or cartoon characters. What it had was bulldozers. And giant cranes, and back-hoes, and wrecking balls, and other pieces of heavy equipment for putting up buildings or ripping them down. I like the timelessness of that. Today we can take our entertainment from virtual reahty and sometimes do, but the fences around construction sites still have windows cut in them for the sake of curious pedestrians, and they never stand empty.Mammoth construction is enthralling; think of how many tourist sites are built around things whose major claim to fame is that they are not just big but stupefying-ly big: the Great Wall of China, the Eiffel Tower, Mount Rushmore____Look at the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, legendary for their size as much as their artisanship. The Temple of Artemis in Ephesus, 425 feet long and 220 feet wide. The 100-foot Colossus of Rhodes. The five 50-foot terraces of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. The Mausoleum at Halicar-nassus, 140 feet high. The Olympian Zeus, 40 feet of gold, ivory and marble. The Great Pyramid of Cheops, covering 13 acres. The 500-foot-tall lighthouse at Pharos. By the standards of past centuries, erecting such monuments was heroic.Modern architects and engineers are still building gigantic structures, often on a scale so huge that it would have dazzled not merely the builders of ancient times but even those of a few decades ago. In our special report on the latest architectural Wonders of the Modern World, beginning on page 59, we take a look at just a few of the most gigantic civil engineering projects recently finished or nearing completion.Count on more and larger projects to take shape in the decades and centuries ahead. How far can things go? Physicist Freeman Dyson speculated years ago that a sufficiently advanced civilization might disassemble the planets of our solar system and construct a spherical shell to catch all the sun's energy. If they were building a Dyson sphere, would they have to cut holes in it for passersby? And who do you suppose would be looking in?JOHN RENNIE, Editor in Chief [email protected]