Could this really happen?

Via File 770, I noticed this:

Firm Floats Plan to Hang Colossal Skyscraper From an Asteroid

Click through to see the amazing artist’s rendition of how this might look.

Don’t expect it to go up anytime soon, but a New York City-based design firm has floated a mind-bending plan for the erection of a skyscraper it bills as “the world’s tallest building ever.”

Dubbed Analemma, the fanciful tower wouldn’t be built on the ground, but suspended in air by cables from an asteroid repositioned into geosynchronous Earth orbit just for the purpose.

Over the course of each day, the floating skyscraper would trace a figure-eight path over our planet’s surface, according to plans posted online by Clouds Architecture Office. It would swing between the northern and southern hemispheres, returning to the same point once every 24 hours.

The speed of the tower relative to the ground would vary depending upon which part of the figure eight it was tracing, with the slowest speeds at the top and bottom of each loop, the plans say. The asteroid’s orbit would be calibrated so that the slowest part of the tower’s path would occur over New York City.

That’s … mind-boggling, both in itself and for the statement it would make. (LOOK, WE ARE IN THE FUTURE!)

a) I trust planes could avoid this structure?

b) Birds would be okay, I guess? It’s hard to see how anything could accidentally hit a thing as large as this.

c) Wow, talk about totally being safe from earthquakes and stuff, maybe they should hang one up over California?

d) The concern expressed in the article, that people who live in a tower literally separated from the Earth would feel disconnected and psychologically separate, I don’t know, could be. It would depend on how easy it is to go back and forth, probably.

e) This is just … really cool.

The future, we are in it.

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