Slashdot Mirror
Project Eden
cwernli writes "Project Eden [had to] visually provide a spectacular theater high enough to house the towering trees of the rainforests, wide enough for the sun-baked escarpments of the Mediterranean and, oh yes, become the eighth wonder of the world. Easy!?""
Here is the Eden project page, lest we /. the wrong site...
It opened more than a year ago... I went there last August (it had been open for some time then) and found that it was fantastic.
:)
I know some people complain that "it isn't finished yet", but it never will be in a sense. Certainly a lot of the plants were mature enough to give a sense of the places they're meant to emulate.
Oh, and BTW, they grow tonnes of hemp. Albeit the de-interesting-ingrediented type
- Oliver
The right to bear arms is only slightly less stupid than the right to arm bears...
In Milwaukee, WI there is a place known as "The Domes" (The actual name is the Mitchell Park Horticultural Conservatory) They are 3 beehive (not geodesic) shaped domes that house 3 separate climates (arid, tropical, and something called "Floral Show") that are 85' tall. Construction on them was completed in 1967 for a measly 4.5 million.
Yeah, I realize it's not quite the same as PE but I thought everyone should know that we yanks have our own big plastic plant house thingies too.
The relevance to computing is that the geodesic domes were actually designed and the parts built by CIM - all the way from the CAD files to setting up and cutting the metal. As they fit onto a non-level site against the side of a quarry, this is a great demonstration of what can be done with state of the art engineering.
One big function of Eden is education - to explain to kids reared on fast food and television why different habitats are important and why the preservation of rain forests thousands of miles away actually matters to them. At a cost of less than $150 million (not the ludicrous £86 billion one dumbskull suggested) that's less than Hollywood can spend on a film about an adolescent fantasy, and is a fraction of what Disney spends on a theme park intended to give a ludicrously false impression of, say, Europe or of US history.
But perhaps some correspondents are really incensed because the Eden project refers to the way in which some US drug companies have been allowed to patent medicines used by indigenous peoples for years.
Having said that, I was pretty incensed during my visit by a set of untrue statistics quoted above the entrance about world distribution of wealth. It's that kind of carelessness that provides ammunition to the Armalites-and-SUVS-are-in-the-Constitution brigade.
Panurge has posted for the last time. Thanks for the positive moderations.
Kew Gardens, in the centre of London, is probably the Victorian version of this. It has glass houses for tropical, hothouse and desert landscapes, and even managed to get a titan arum flowering last month for the second time. (I went to see it, damn it was huge)
Not as big a scale of course, but the Millenium Seed Bank project gives it a well defined purpose other than a simple tourist attraction; to collect and conserve 10%, over 24,000 species, of the world's seed-bearing flora, principally from the drylands by 2010 and to collect and conserve seeds of the entire UK native seed-bearing flora by 2000.
"The biomes were erected with a combination of cranes (static and mobile) and scaffolding. The scaffolding made the Guinness Book of Records. At 192 feet (58.5 meters), it was the highest freestanding structure in the world.
Is really, really, wrong. Maybe he means that it was the highest scaffolding in the world. But whatever he meant by it, you would think that an architecture magazine would deliver more accurate information.
Bibo Ergo Sum.