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Starfleet Academy / headquarters / assembly room

If anyone wants to know what living underground would look like, I suggest they go watch Voyager's pilot "The Caretaker" and pay attention to the Ocampa city.

That Winscape thing is cool. I want to win the lottery so I can build a house with a basement level like the Enterprise. And live feed an Earth view from the ISS to all of the windows. Kind of like ten-forward.
 
Where's the difference between living underground and living on a spaceship or space station? In space you are even more trapped.

And I heard no word about people living underground, only industry, commercial and transportation facilities. If you take Manhattan and turn every commercially used building upside down and put a park on top, that would make for a pretty green island. And it would make no difference (to me at least, I think) to take the elevator to the 100th floor or the 100th sublevel.

wasn't Roddenberry's picture of San Francisco one in which:

"Industry, commerce and transportation facilities are [predominantly] underground so that the surface of the planet can be a place to be enjoyed"?

That doesn't sound to me as if anyone would be prevented from going outside.

Still, there'd be billions of people living underground (and as I said, is there enough ROOM underground for the entire population of the Earth?), all of whom are going to want some fresh air from time to time. How would they allocate this? Obviously they couldn't all go at once. The pedestrian traffic jams would be legendary. :borg:

Why do you assume from "Industry, commerce and transportation facilities" that people live underground, too?
 
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I must say that I got mixed feelings regarding ST XI San Francisco. Architecture does look nice, but the city itself looks way too over developed for a city that's supposed to represent the paradise that this future Earth is supposed to be.

Check out this ST Online Academy concept painting:

fc007l.jpg


Waaay better and more "heavenly" than what we got in the movie, IMO.

This image just bugs me for some reason. It looks more like concept art for a Star Trek theme park in SFC than the central hub for an interplanetary coalition.
 
And I heard no word about people living underground, only industry, commercial and transportation facilities. If you take Manhattan and turn every commercially used building upside down and put a park on top, that would make for a pretty green island. And it would make no difference (to me at least, I think) to take the elevator to the 100th floor or the 100th sublevel.

wasn't Roddenberry's picture of San Francisco one in which:

"Industry, commerce and transportation facilities are [predominantly] underground so that the surface of the planet can be a place to be enjoyed"?

That doesn't sound to me as if anyone would be prevented from going outside.

Still, there'd be billions of people living underground (and as I said, is there enough ROOM underground for the entire population of the Earth?), all of whom are going to want some fresh air from time to time. How would they allocate this? Obviously they couldn't all go at once. The pedestrian traffic jams would be legendary. :borg:

Why do you assume from "Industry, commerce and transportation facilities" that people live underground, too?
I didn't quote it earlier, but it was in the post I cited as being the "example which sparked this tangent" and to which I did link. I'll quote it in full here (pertinent passage put in bold):
The camera circles around a bit and http://movies.trekcore.com/gallery/albums/xihd/trekxihd0726.jpg ends on this angle of Bones walking away with the Transamerica Pyramid in shot.

:sigh:

"In the far distance, the distinctively pointed shape of the old TRANSAMERICA BUILDING. Everywhere else, the San Francisco urban sprawl is totally gone, replaced by lovely groves of large trees, green meadows, streams, lakes, and crystal clear air. (There still exists a small San Francisco "Living Museum" city but it is far enough away to be hidden by trees and will not appear in this story.) Here, as in much of the world, people live mostly in the climate-controlled, colorful and efficient "subterra cities." All industry and transport is now underground. Clearly Earth has become the home of a people who love and protect their living planet." - Star Trek: The Motion Picture Draft Screenplay by Gene Roddenberry (1978).

"If we have the opportunity to see Earth, we will discover that it has been largely returned to its natural state. Lush forests and barren deserts are preserved in pollution-free purity. Industry, commerce and transportation facilities are predominately underground so that the surface of the planet can be a place to be enjoyed." - 23rd century Earth: Context for Enterprise Crew by Phase II Script Editor/ST:TMP Associate Producer Jon Povill (1977).

BTW, the bulbous structure ahead and to the right of McCoy(?) in that screencap looks suspiciously like Santiago Calatrava's L'Hemisfèric theatre in Valencia, Spain.

SLR
So most people in Roddenberry's scenario are living underground, in San Francisco and in most of the rest of the world. I won't say that I think that's the way the real world should go, but it would be doable and it would have certain advantages.

Of course, the reason it came up here was because the San Francisco seen in the new movie had grown in more or less the opposite direction from the one Roddenberry had been imagining.

(And that does look a lot like L'Hemisfèric in the picture of McCoy walking away. Huh. There are probably more details like that to be discovered.)
 
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Oh, for fuck's sake! I don't have time to answer every (bullshit) objection raised raised by MLB, but this schematic scanned from the aforementioned Golany-Ojima volume illustrates a subterranean city concept with residences on the surface which is most likely what GR had in mind judging by 23rd century San Francisco as glimpsed in the Pre-DE versions of ST:TMP. Incidentally, the tubes on the Golden Gate Bridge roadway are a component of the Robert Salter's Planetran network, which GR featured heavily in his failed TV pilots Genesis II and Planet Earth. Beyond the astronomical energy savings afforded by such a vactrain system, I wonder if the current Icelandic volcano-induced grounding of petty much all air traffic in Europe will inspire the relevant political/industrial classes to give this baby another look.

SLR
 
I must say that I got mixed feelings regarding ST XI San Francisco. Architecture does look nice, but the city itself looks way too over developed for a city that's supposed to represent the paradise that this future Earth is supposed to be.

Check out this ST Online Academy concept painting:

fc007l.jpg


Waaay better and more "heavenly" than what we got in the movie, IMO.

This image just bugs me for some reason. It looks more like concept art for a Star Trek theme park in SFC than the central hub for an interplanetary coalition.
Where's the roller coaster? ;)
 
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