The Call of the Open Sidewalk

Much of the earlier habits of Earthly society have been given up in the interest of that same economy and efficiency: space, privacy, even much of free will. They are the products of civilization, however, and not more than ten thousand years old.

The adjustment of sleep to night, however, is as old as man: a million years. The habit is not easy to give up. Although the evening is unseen, apartment lights dim as the hours of darkness pass and the City's pulse sinks. Though no one can tell noon from midnight by any cosmic phenomenon along the enclosed avenues of the City, mankind follows the mute partitionings of the hour hand.

The expressways empty, the noise of life sinks, the moving mob along the colossal alleys melts away; New York City lies in Earth's unnoticed shadow, and its population sleeps.

The Caves of Steel, Isaac Asimov, 1953

OK, here we are living in the future. Others have written at length about the absence of flying cars but what about wildly artificial environments? Space habitats? Underground cities? Huge isolated skyscrapers? Floating cities? Cities at the bottom of the ocean? Any sort of archology at all? The sort of places that the geeky set can have adventures in (or at least be respected for their ability to function in high tech environments). A science fiction cliche. The only reason Asimov bothered to describe his Cities in any detail was because he wanted to do a detective mystery there. We all knew what he meant.

Classic science fiction about such places can now be considered to be incomplete in light of our recent knowledge about circadian light. The required means of regulating circadian light and the associated rules would change a lot of narrative.

The interesting real life questions are:

Does the circadian light idea allow us to create entirely artificial environments?

and (less important)

Does the circadian light idea allow us to improve the sort of indoor environments we face today?

posted at: 11:48 | path: /clight | permanent link to this entry