Masters of the 3rd Dimension
Humans are on the precipice of breaking the z barrier, and life on Earth will never be the same again.
May 1st, 1870 was a day that changed the world forever, except that most people don’t know about it. It is one of those rarest of days that marks a turning point in history, when a new technology emerges such that nothing can ever be the same again. For a man named Elisha Otis, it represented vindication of his two decade-long struggle to convince people of his invention’s utility.
The Equitable Life office building at 120 Broadway in New York City was the newest, biggest building in the world. At a soaring 130 feet, it dwarfed its neighbors in lower Manhattan, beginning an architectural arms race for prestige that still continues today between the world’s wealthiest businesses. As a structure, the building was no more technologically advanced than many of its contemporaries, but its great height was made feasible by Otis’ incredible invention — the passenger elevator. At first, it was ridiculed by the press as a gimmick, or worse, a ‘dumbwaiter’ to move the lower classes of workers swiftly up to their desks on higher floors, bypassing elegant staircases where businessmen might wish to congregate and discuss their dealings. Within just a few months however, the upper floors were fully occupied not by crowded factory-style offices of secretarial employees, but by the most prominent lawyers and bankers in the City. The elevator had literally turned the building upside-down. The penthouse was born, and the sky was now the limit for the new class of skyscrapers that would come to dominate cities worldwide within a century.
Barely thirty years after Elisha Otis’ invention allowed cities to begin building upwards as well as outwards, the Wright brothers were testing a more daring means for mankind to leave the ground over the sands of Kitty Hawk in North Carolina’s Outer Banks. Since time immemorial, people had dreamed of acquiring the abilities of birds, of flying away from the ground into the freedom of the air above. Tales from ancient times tell of man’s attempts to engineer flight, and some of the greatest minds in history had tried to imagine how a functional flying machine might work in practice, but none had yet been built.
Mastering flight would seemingly allow one to overcome any obstacle, travel anywhere, with complete freedom of the Earth. For Orville and Wilbur Wright, this was an opportunity to apply their knowledge of cutting-edge engineering and physics to do what no one had previously accomplished, and create powered flight at last. Their early prototype aircraft were crude and only flew for a few hundred feet, but were sufficient to prove that it was possible to overcome the iron grip of gravity using modern technology and engineering, such as it was in 1903. Just as Otis’ elevator allowed people to leave the ground — to create buildings that allowed their occupants to move ever upward — the Wrights’ invention would lead to a new kind of freedom in the skies above our Earth.
Over a century has passed since Orville and Wilbur Wright first demonstrated that human flight was possible. Aircraft have been refined and developed to the extent that millions of people fly thousands of miles every day. Humans have even flown to the Moon and back, and sent robotic probes on journeys throughout the solar system. You can now go to any hobbyist store and buy a model aircraft that has far greater range and maneuverability than anything the Wright brothers were able to create over their entire careers, for less than the price of a big-screen TV. Yet human civilization remains a largely two-dimensional affair.
Even though the utility of elevators has allowed architects to stretch their buildings high into the sky above the ground, they remain a stack of individual two-dimensional spaces. Virtually all of human civilization can be effectively mapped on the two-dimensional screen of a smartphone, and the layering of a few two-dimensional floor maps is sufficient to fill in the details of multistory buildings such as malls. Modern planes fly passengers thousands of miles across the globe, but are essentially still barely more than highly-maneuverable projectiles, destined to travel directly from one point on the surface of the Earth to another. Although we are three-dimensional creatures, we are still largely trapped inside a two-dimensional maze that is our civilization. We have but one outpost, a tiny colony of 6 people in orbit about 200 miles above the surface of the Earth, where humans truly exist in a three-dimensional environment, and things work very differently up there.
May 1st, 2020. Exactly 150 years after the passenger elevator first allowed humans to realize the dream of ascending out of the dirt of the city to reach the clean and clear skies above. I’m on the phone with my Mother to wish her a happy birthday and check her cake arrived OK.
“Hang on dear, I think I can hear an Amazon Drone outside the front door now. That’s probably it.”
The video on my screen jerks around drunkenly. Mom never remembers to leave her phone alone when video chatting, so I get to watch a ten second flyover shot of her living room carpet. As she opens the door, a small black quadcopter rises from the porch and buzzes off into the sunshine like a giant, crazy insect, leaving a small brown box behind.
Back inside, Mom opens the box and thanks me for the lovely cake we just sent. How did anyone deliver fresh food or flowers before we had the drones to carry them high over all the rough city streets? Everything used to get so mushed up. It’s amazing what all this technology does nowadays, she wonders aloud, before we say our goodbyes and hang up. I turn on the TV and continue watching a live video stream from the drone swarm that is following a family of blue whales migrating off the California coast.
A confluence of technologies is once again about the change the way we live forever. The camera drones that some feel threaten their privacy are only the beginning of a new wave of flying machines that will move human civilization further into the third dimension. The continuing downward spiral in the cost of sensors and computing power will allow more and more autonomous robots to navigate the skies around each other. As these aircraft begin to be used for logistics and delivery services, market pressures will inevitably push the development of more efficient and powerful machines to carry larger loads, just as happened when railways and motor cars were “crazy new things”. Once the technology to safely carry 500 pounds or more becomes widely affordable, it is inevitable that people will want to start riding them. The longed-for flying car might finally soon be here at last, in some form or other. Regardless, the sky is soon set to become a much busier place.
What will all this mean for human civilization? Our towns and cities have developed throughout history based on ownership of flat squares of earth. What happens to our carefully laid out urban landscapes when flying machines can simply zip over the top of obstacles or bypass the road system? What happens if a major drone flight path passes right over your house? Are cities going to create no-fly routes, or minimum altitudes for drone flights, to minimize disruption to people living on the surface? Will we create highways in the sky to funnel traffic through routes that minimize noise and danger to the surface below? Is it even possible to create a fixed infrastructure for autonomous aerial vehicles? How will people maintain privacy when a fence or hedge is no longer sufficient to obscure their home from the public spaces beyond? How will governments secure important buildings and military bases when the skies above them are open and accessible to everyone? The technology is already here, and the products will soon follow. The question is whether human society is ready to move deliberately into the third dimension, or if we will once again undergo a cultural shock that upends the fabric of our way of life before we accept its reality.
