Imagine

... living in paradise

You climb a small tree in a warm sheltered garden bursting with your favorite fruit and vegetables. It is surrounded by a light and airy soil covered overhang that keeps off rain and dew. You lounge on your bed in bright morning sunlight deep in thought. It is quiet and tranquil - not a single mosquito or fly to disturb your intense joy at savoring the resonant chords of a new song you have just improvised and like the sound of.

You banter for a moment in the dappled leaf filtered shade with a friend who has just announced himself with a compliment while his 3D hologram moves realistically near you as if he were there. He comments on the ripening dragon fruit in your LifeBubble and invites himself over for an afternoon "dragon" feast. Its so comfortable you only needed to put clothes on when you step outside into the first autumn frosts, to collect wild berries along the forest path.

As evening falls, you lie on your back and gaze up at the milky way starting to take form through a dynamic transparent dome above you that opens and closes automatically like the petals of a flower to regulate the temperature and humidity. You wonder at the foresight of your ancestors to create a living space like this that is still as sturdy today as when it was built was over a thousand years ago.

As you look around at the moss and lichen encrusted rocks in the garden and playful frescoes on the walls that have been touched up and added to through the generations, you recall stories of how people once used to work over 40 hours a week doing things they didn’t really enjoy just to be able to "own" a box-like building that needed lots of energy just to make it livable and that amazingly produced no food.

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Fast forward 1000 years

Imagine the city of the future. It produces most of its food within its own footprint. It maintains comfortable living and working spaces using only the solar energy harvested from each building's own footprint to heat, cool and light the interior.

A city where, even in the driest of desert ecosystems, each building has its own constantly replenishing decentralized supply of pure drinking water without the need for big pipes connecting the city to a reservoir.

Using only renewable energy, each building recycles all of its used water and nutrients locally to produce fresh healthy food and leafy surroundings in its immediate vicinity.

A series of small roads and paths connect these bubbles of life and loop through a mosaic of grain fields, leafy forests and winds along beside natural creeks and wetlands perhaps converging to high speed long distance underground transport tunnels that facilitate cross cultural visits for trade and exchange of ideas between cities, with no unnecessary energy wasted on keeping planes in the sky. The local roads and paths are hosts to sleek ergonomically designed hybrid human power boosted/solar electric vehicles that are fast, compact and safe.

People spend more time playing together, sharing their emotions, ideas and energy, helping others and spending less time doing paid work. They live longer, happier lives and the glint of fun filled life-long learning is in their eyes.

The internet is universally available and ideas and creativity flow freely to and from the people it connects like synapses in the mind of gaia, creating a chain reaction of collective awareness or “super-consciousness”.

People are much healthier because they are less stressed, eat nutritious locally produced food, fast and exercise more. So medical interventions for “lifestyle” diseases are rare.

As the global population is stable, no energy is wasted on planning and building outmoded and unsustainable short life-cycle structures. Instead, architects and building designers collaborate to refine inter-generational human habitats shaped out of rock-like materials, soil, and plants that self-regulate and continually renew themselves.

People and their plants live and work in these LifeBubbles, in semi-enclosed living structures that are more like human vivariums than houses. They are shaped into the earth rather than built on it and are designed to last for at least a millennium with only incidental maintenance.

LifeBubbles are high science, low-tech structures. They use ultra long lasting rock-like ceramic, concrete and polymer composite materials, passive thermal mass heat gradients and transpiration to regulate living space temperatures and create passive ventilation.

The sun and food plants replenish oxygen in the air and fix carbon dioxide from respiration. Biolytic soil ecosystems in structured organic soil containers recycle the nutrients from used water, which is then wicked to the plants' roots without the need for electrical pumps. Gravity aids the purification process as the water filters through the subsoil to the aquifer and small ponds or streams.

LifeBubbles have the possiblility to be super-productive human ecosystems because they are climate-controlled habitats. Specially selected high-yielding food plants are cultivated in optimally engineered soil and growing conditions. Insects, rodents and other fresh food and stored food pests are physically and ecologically excluded . As an additional bonus, mosquitoes, flies, fruit flies, pest birds and animals and other unwanted creepy crawlies are also excluded from this consciously designed ideal human habitat.

Enchantment

Play and exercise

Food

Taste