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!?""

Comments

Web site

[doru]

Here is the Eden project page, lest we /. the wrong site...

builders wanted for Project Babel

[beckett]

Now it will be EASY to get funding for my giant tower to reach into heaven! I'll be starting IPO in a week. For now, i'll need about a thousand strong men with bricklaying experience that all speak the same language.

Some uninformed comments

[panurge]

From some people who might actually try visiting, if they're not afraid of Europe being hit by Pakistani or Indian missiles

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.