Honorable Mention
2017 Skyscraper Competition
Arturo Emilio Garrido Ontiveros, Andrés Pastrana Bonillo, Judit Pinach Martí, Alex Tintea
Spain
From the beginning of time we have shown our eagerness towards progress. “Mutable man may be able to make them (challenges of life within the boundaries of death) – our existence as a species can have genuine meaning and fulfillment. However, vast the darkness, we must supply our own light.” – Kubrick said.
The very meaninglessness of life forces a man to create his own meaning. We could understand the history of mankind though this eagerness, from the cave man – to the industrial revolution.
Elon Musk says there are two fundamental paths to our future, one path is we stay on Earth forever with an eventual extinction event. The other is to become a multi-planetary species, which should be our generation’s milestone. Dreaming for the stars
The first step should Mars, which is better suited to scale up to host a multi-planetary civilization that any other planet from our solar system. Our mission is to create a habitat that would host the first city on Mars. Our proposal is the axis between the first flights and the terraforming of the planet. A building that would serve as an entrance to Mars.
Before terraforming Mars we must think of an access to it. We propose a space elevator that would be composed of four elements. A counterweight to the top, a tent to the bottom, a tube that connects both elements and the elevator itself.
The counterweight would be located at a distance to which an object in the orbit moves at the same speed as the rotation of the planet. It would receive the spaceships and host the necessary laboratories in a radial composition. A skin covers the capsules and absorbs the solar energy far from the contamination of the atmosphere. It is a door to the habitat.
The tube would connect both the counterweight and the habitat on Mars. It must be strong enough to resist the traction produced by the rotation of the counterweight and wide enough to host the elevator.
“You need to live in a dome, initially”.
In order to make the planet habitable, we first start by creating a tent inside which life will start for the first time. At first, a small volume of oxygen will be separated from the abundant carbon dioxide in order to make the air breathable inside the tent. The soil would be transformed and vegetation would grow.
The tent is designed to grow larger as the population increases. It also has a radial composition that allows the dome to grow in all directions.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License permitting non-commercial sharing with attribution. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
