Inhabiting The Earth As A Finite World

Since the 'sixties anxiety about the future of mankind has led to a number of major publications on the world's vital problems and the relationship be tween them, the best known being the reports to the Club of Rome. This study of the problems of providing living accommodation for a rapid ly growing world population, taking into account the limits that must be set to this growth, was started in 1973 at the Academy of Architecture and Erasmus University, Rotterdam, and testifies to the same anxiety. Inhabiting the Earth as a Finite World is the impressive result of a study of the consequences of meeting the just demand for good accommodation for all the earth's in habitants, worked out with the aid of a world model and a number of case studies. The value of models, especially very complex ones, is at present debatable. Nevertheless, they can often cast light on complex situations. The simplified form of the real situation, which every model in fact is, allows certain impli cations of decisions to be discerned and taken into account in planning. The comparison of the results of the study with the design process is a clear example of this.

Since the 'sixties anxiety about the future of mankind has led to a number of major publications on the world's vital problems and the relationship be tween them, the best known being the reports to the Club of Rome. This study of the problems of providing living accommodation for a rapid ly growing world population, taking into account the limits that must be set to this growth, was started in 1973 at the Academy of Architecture and Erasmus University, Rotterdam, and testifies to the same anxiety. Inhabiting the Earth as a Finite World is the impressive result of a study of the consequences of meeting the just demand for good accommodation for all the earth's in habitants, worked out with the aid of a world model and a number of case studies. The value of models, especially very complex ones, is at present debatable. Nevertheless, they can often cast light on complex situations. The simplified form of the real situation, which every model in fact is, allows certain impli cations of decisions to be discerned and taken into account in planning. The comparison of the results of the study with the design process is a clear example of this.

In a series of televised interviews broadcast in spring 2022, Bruno Latour explained, in clear and straightforward terms, how humans have changed the planet and why environmental disasters are an intrinsic part of modern life. We have now come to realize that all life depends on a thin skin of our planet that is only few kilometres thick – what scientists call the ‘critical zone’. Our capacity to continue to live on a planet we are transforming is now at risk and if we wish to survive as a species, we must put an end to the mechanisms of destruction, rethink our connection to living beings, and face head-on the confrontation between the extractivists who are exploiting the Earth’s resources and the ecologists. This poignant reflection on the greatest challenge of our time was also an opportunity for Latour to explain the underlying thread that guided his work throughout his career, from his pathbreaking research on the social construction of scientific knowledge to his last writings on the Anthropocene.

Interest in exoplanets--the worlds of other stars--is not new. From the late 17th century until the end of the 19th, almost all educated people believed that the stars are suns surrounded by inhabited planets--a belief that was expressed not in science fiction, but in serious speculation, both scientific and religious, as well as in poetry. Only during the first half of the 20th century was it thought that life-bearing exoplanets are rare. This is not a science book--rather, it belongs to the category known as History of Ideas. First published by Atheneum in 1974, it tells the story of the rise, fall, and eventual renewal of widespread conviction that we are not alone in the universe. In this 2012 updated edition the chapters dealing with modern speculation have been revised to reflect the progress science has made during the past 40 years, including the actual detection of planets orbiting other stars. However, it is not intended to be more than a brief introduction to today's views; its focus is on little-known facts about those of the past. Why should we care what our forebears believed? Now, the question of ET life is a matter for investigation by science. Yet it's significant that most educated people of past centuries were convinced that other inhabited worlds exist, without any scientific evidence whatsoever. This historical fact reveals that human beings have an instinctive sense of kinship with the wider universe and a desire to see the realms that lie beyond this one small planet--and perhaps, eventually, to go there. Our ancestors conceived of such voyages only in a spiritual sense, as occurring after death. But we who have taken our first small steps into space are aware that our descendants may set foot on the worlds of other suns. Just as in the 17th century people were initially upset by the new knowledge that the stars are suns scattered in space rather than lights fixed to a nearby sphere, the growing awareness that Earth is not safely isolated from whatever lies beyond makes many of our contemporaries uneasy. Thus today's predominant feelings about spaceships are ambivalent. Nevertheless, if an impulse toward belief that we are not alone in the universe is indeed an innate characteristic of human beings, as the past spread of belief in inhabited exoplanets suggests, we can be sure that those who follow us will not turn back from becoming spacefarers.

Using biblically sound principles, Pastor Hope points out that faith in the Lord Jesus Christ brings the believer into the realm of eternity--a realm that is not bound by the dimensions of time and space.--Tom Battle Sr., pastor, Lord's Glory Church.

Beyond Sustainable discusses the relationship between human-beings and the constructed environments of habitation we create living in the Anthropocene, an increasingly volatile and unpredictable landscape of certain change. This volume accepts that human-beings have reached a moment beyond climatological and ecological crisis. It asks not how we resolve the crisis but, rather, how we can cope with, or adapt to, the irreversible changes in the earth-system by rethinking how we choose to inhabit the world-ecology. Through an examination of numerous historical and contemporary projects of architecture and art, as well as observations in philosophy, ecology, evolutionary biology, genetics, neurobiology and psychology, this book reimagines architecture capable of influencing and impacting who we are, how we live, what we feel and even how we evolve. Beyond Sustainable provides students and academics with a single comprehensive overview of this architectural reconceptualization, which is grounded in an ecologically inclusive and co-productive understanding of architecture.