Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

It's time to build: a New World's Fair

cameronwiese.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 237 posts

Re: It's time to build: a New World's Fair

#111

Post by xeromal »

CoffeeOnWrite wrote: post #94
labster wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Speak for yourself. Los Angeles ran a profitable Olympics in 1984 and we look forward to doing so again in 2028. And nationalism is at a low ebb here, given our last four years fighting His Nibs on everything. It’s all about competition and entertainment for us. And infrastructure that can be reused for more entertainment.

> profitable > we look forward to doing so again in 2028 Oligarchs and capitalists benefit, the masses lose though. Especially those most vulnerable socioeconomically.

The hope for the 2028 olympics in LA is more public transportation which is currently being built. It's exciting to see the new lines currently popping up.

Re: It's time to build: a New World's Fair

#112

Post by basch »

poisonborz wrote: post #35

I admire the optimism and motivational tone of the article, but fairs and expos are a thing of the past. We don't need to build elaborate, carefully constructed single-use cities to showcase the scientific advances of the world. Those showcases happen day by day on the internet and mass media.

I am very much pro World Fair revival.

But

I am also very Cold War revival. We should be launching competitive science wars with each other, not unlike the Olympics. Set objectives, set time periods, when the time and objective expire all knowledge gained is pooled and published for the world, for free. National or International propaganda campaigns to recruit for teams. Spies, espionage, moles. Not just a science fair, but something a bit more dirty and fun.

Re: It's time to build: a New World's Fair

#113

Post by jhu247 »

It's amazing to me that the World's Fair gave us so many iconic and wonderful structures, all of which are probably too impractical to build otherwise: the Eiffel Tower, Space Needle, Unisphere, Palace of Fine Arts, etc. It's unrealistic, but it's worth having a new world's fair just for an excuse to build another one of these!

Re: It's time to build: a New World's Fair

#114

Post by diebeforei485 »

caslon wrote: post #8
git_configured wrote: post #3

Was very surprised to not see any mention of Expo2020, which has been hailed as a "World's Fair for the 21st Century". UAE and Dubai put tons of resources and capital into it but obviously had to deal with the issue of in person events in 2020. As I understand it has been rescheduled for the end of 2021... https://expo2020dubai.ae/en/

I really don't think Expo2020 counts. Rooting the future in the UAE seems like a losing battle, and it seems like the amount of entities that would choose not to participate would outweigh those that would.

I'm not sure this has any basis in reality, every single country has committed to participating.

Re: It's time to build: a New World's Fair

#115

Post by bluescrn »

Scene_Cast2 wrote: post #50
dgellow wrote: post #41

> Now, flicking your wearable token with impatient fingers, you feel a slight force as your Hyperloop pod comes to a stop. You lost me at “Hyperloop”. How is that a vision of the future when we know for a fact that the idea doesn’t make practical sense?

The US already has established air travel. And mass transit via trains is not a technological problem, it is a political and a marketing problem. Hyperloop has the potential to solve the political and marketing problems.

Until the first 'hypercrash'

Re: It's time to build: a New World's Fair

#116

Post by mminer237 »

musicale wrote: post #89
Animats wrote: post #73

The last really prophetic world's fair was New York, 1939. That's famous for GM's vision of the future of 1960, the original "Futurerama" . Freeways everywhere. RCA had television. AT&T let you make free long distance calls. All that stuff happened. The 1964 World's Fair had another GM exhibit. Colonization of the Moon. Underwater cities. None of that happened. What could we have in a World's Fair now that looks ahea…

Certainly it's harder to get to Mars, but is the environment more hostile than on the moon? Mars has something of a CO2 atmosphere, and might have more accessible water. The soil may be more usable as well.

It's not physically more hostile than the moon, but we've never colonized the moon for the same reason. It's really hard to live there for not much benefit. There are plenty of sparsely-inhabited deserts on Earth that are much nicer places to live.

Re: It's time to build: a New World's Fair

#118

Post by UncleOxidant »

basch wrote: post #112
poisonborz wrote: post #35

I admire the optimism and motivational tone of the article, but fairs and expos are a thing of the past. We don't need to build elaborate, carefully constructed single-use cities to showcase the scientific advances of the world. Those showcases happen day by day on the internet and mass media.

I am very much pro World Fair revival. But I am also very Cold War revival. We should be launching competitive science wars with each other, not unlike the Olympics. Set objectives, set time periods, when the time and objective expire all knowledge gained is pooled and published for the world, for free. National or International propaganda campaigns to recruit for teams. Spies, espionage, moles. Not just a science fa…

> I am also very Cold War revival.

Complete with threats of total annihilation?

> We should be launching competitive science wars with each other

Don't we have this now with competitive global capitalism? I guess it's not the nationstate so much now as the multinational corporation, though, that are the entities competing.

I can kind of understand your wish for a Cold War revival - we certainly had more of a sense of national purpose during that period. But it was driven by fear of the other and I'm not sure that ultimately that's a good motivation.

You'd think that maybe something like a global pandemic would give us a national purpose that would have brought us together, but look what happened, just more fracturing: anti-maskers, anti-vaxxers, even covid-deniers.

Re: It's time to build: a New World's Fair

#119

Post by Aeolun »

> They no longer showcase the promise of the future or celebrate achievement. Instead, they serve as national branding exercises, infrastructure development projects masquerading as innovation, architecture competitions, and an opportunity to promote tourism

I kind of feel that these were the exact goals of the original world fairs too.

Re: It's time to build: a New World's Fair

#120

Post by terse_malvolio »

Animats wrote: post #73

The last really prophetic world's fair was New York, 1939. That's famous for GM's vision of the future of 1960, the original "Futurerama" . Freeways everywhere. RCA had television. AT&T let you make free long distance calls. All that stuff happened. The 1964 World's Fair had another GM exhibit. Colonization of the Moon. Underwater cities. None of that happened. What could we have in a World's Fair now that looks ahea…

    We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard (...)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_choose_to_go_to_the_Moon
Post reply on HN