Atmosphæra Incognita

by Neal Stephenson

The answer, simply, was that the tower was going to be visible from the hills above Oakland and Berkeley: a spendy part of the world where lots of rich people were accustomed to looking out the windows of their nice houses and seeing the landscape. And only the landscape. They didn’t want their views marred by a twenty-kilometer-high “monstrosity” whose “stark, ugly, industrial profile” was going to be “cluttered” with “ungainly industrial encrustations” and “gaudy” with a “Las Vegas-style light show” that would “sully the purity of the skies night and day.”

When the jet stream played on the tower’s upper reaches like a firehose slamming into a kid’s Tinkertoy contraption—when, in other words, the maximum possible crush was being imposed on the downwind legs—the wings on that side would be trimmed so as to lift the whole thing upward and relieve the strain. Performing a kind of aerodynamic jujitsu, redirecting the very energy that would destroy the tower to actively hold it up. The tower would become half building, half kite.

Donning, as most of us knew, meant putting on space suits. It was to living on the Top Click what the life vest drill was to an ocean cruise. Thanks to the space tourism industry, it had become pretty idiot proof. Even so, it did take a few minutes.