Buckminster Fuller figured out at one point that he could put a giant geodesic dome (were talking like a mile diameter) over part of the city of Manhattan and it would pay for itself in a couple of years with the saved energy. I don't know what it was going to be made out of, or covered with, but it is interesting that the geodesic dome is the only structure we know of that actually gets stronger the larger it gets. I also don't know where the supposed energy savings were going to come from, I guess heating and snow plowing and stuff. Anyway, that dome never got built, why? well, I don't know the specifics of the circumstances, but you can imagine it probably had something to do with people thinking it maybe might not work. Ok, I know I said "lots of fear" in the title, but apprehension just doesn't sound as good. Also, I'm sure any potential investors would have been genuinely "afraid" of losing their money, and the city would have been authentically "concerned" , at the least, for the well being of its citizens, etc, etc. In short, the whole project was probably met with a lot of skepticism, which is what I was really trying to get at here, that people allow what they believe to interfere with their reason on much more subtle levels than we are usually aware of. We should probably be critical of this. People believe that making big things, is hard, and that it maybe won't work, which is reinforced in many peoples lives by things going wrong, which is often the fault of incompetence (the failure to predict outcomes). Anyway, Robert and I built this dome out of rolled up paper (an idea we got off the internet) for a party at our place, it was fun, people got drunk, nobody learned anything but us. Oh, and sexattack and adjective were the names of the bands, we didnt mean anything by it.... the dome either.
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