I’m a big fan of clouds. The tall ones, specifically. For as long as I remember, I’ve looked at
those giant clouds and wondered just how big they actually were. The size of a football stadium? Of a skyscraper? Of a mountain? Try as I might, I haven’t been able to get
close enough to one to break out my tape measure, but I think, this year, I might have found
the next best thing- the computer-meltingly beautiful Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020. Are you seein these clouds right now? And it’s not just one type of cloud either,
you can do thunder clouds or the high wispy boys, or a perfect scatter, you can decide
how high or low each layer should be, you can watch how the light at different times
of day and different times of year filters through them. They are, without a doubt, the best video
game clouds I have ever seen. If Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 didn’t
even have a ground, and just had these infinite oceans of white to fly through, I think I’d
still be satisfied. But of course, Microsoft Flight Simulator
2020 does have a ground. It has runways, for instance. So you can look at your immensely detailed
cockpits, full of buttons that no one in the history of the world has known the purpose
of. And then you actually have the surrounding
airports as well- it’s pretty cool, you can taxi realistically into the airport, and
see the little terminal and the air traffic control tower and stuff. And then it also has the roads leading up
to the airport, which is neat because you can see all the little cars coming to be a
passenger on Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride, and then it also has the houses and towns and cities
that those cars might have come from, and actually it also has all the land in between
those cities and the airport, and as a matter of fact it has all the land outside of those
two places as well. It has the mountain that your class took a
memorable field trip to in fifth grade, it has the bike path you took to work that one
summer, it has islands in the ocean that it’s likely no aircraft has ever, ever landed on. Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 is possibly
the most indulgent synthesis of software and reality anyone has ever had the chutzpah to
call a “flight simulator.” A 1:1 scale model of earth. It boggles the mind. It’s like if you made a cornhole simulator
and started by programming the residual impact of the big bang. And while, like I said, it has the best clouds
I’ve ever seen inside a computer, I don’t think that’s the real draw of the program. It’s the populated areas, being able to
fly low over Rio, or zoom through Chicago. It’s being able to hop in a plane (or a
drone) at the local airport and go see your house. Most of the, ya know, world, is generated
from satellite data, and it does a really flippin good job of it. You’ll still get goofy little spikes sticking
out of the world occasionally, but it is like, the entire earth and so some imperfections
are understandable. Where it really shines is the cities though,
because many are unbelievably tightly sculpted, the photogrammetry dialed in to a laser’s
focus. The New York of Microsoft Flight Simulator
2020 is, almost perfectly, New York. Every building has its architectural distinctions,
the docks on the shoreline are exactly in place. There are boats in the harbor, there are cars
on the street, there are lights in the windows, there are There’s a moment in this game’s tutorial
that I find really interesting, though it’s probably self-evident to all actual pilots. In the first time the game asks you to actually
fly from one place to another, your copilot gives you a navigation tip that’s basically:
See that highway? Follow it. That’s what direction civilization is. And I was like, oh yeah! That is a neat way to find stuff. Highways are super visible from the air, they
go between population centers, they’re basically a dotted line to follow. In the same way that you might follow a river
if you’re lost in the wild, I, a novice pilot who spends 80% of his airtime with his
landing gear still extended, can follow highways and end up...somewhere. It’s amazing the impact they have on a landscape. But it makes sense. Because, to quote one of the 21st century’s
foremost scholars on urban development, cars are I’ve got a quick, fun anecdote for you: around the turn of the 20th century, New York
was going to be buried under horse poop. For real. There were 100,000 horses in the city, and
each horse poops 50 pounds a day and when you punch those numbers into a calculator
it is too much poop. Many cities were experiencing this. There’s a newspaper that, in 1894, wrote
that in 50 years, London would be buried under 9 feet of manure. And of course, a century later we actually
stand in eighteen feet of poop, riding this wave of waste int- No, of course not. We avoided the turd-choked streets of the
20th century by sidestepping the problem entirely. We more or less rendered horses irrelevant. We got the car now, babyyy. We freakin trounced that horse, we suplexed
that equus, I rule these streets in my 2009 Honda Fit, which has...I dunno, like 7 horsepower
or something. This story, of one crisis being averted by
a new technology, is a fun and kind of comforting analogy. We didn’t actually have to find a way to
make horses poop less, we found a way to sidestep the problem entirely. And, in modern times, I’ve heard it used
as an analogy to excuse the dangerous slip n’ slide into the sea that we’re currently
seated on. We don’t have to change the habits of our
modern world- we just have to wait for new technology to change them for us! But, just comparing transport methods, there’s
a pretty fundamental difference between horses and Lightning McQueen, and that’s that when
you take the horses away, the poop stops. But our landscape is...scarred. Flying over cities, it’s unavoidable how
much land is taken up by just, ugly ass parking lots. As Adele Peters points out, the parking lots
next to Dodgers Stadium in LA are roughly twice the size of the pentagon, and most days,
they’re empty. Occasionally, they’ll be filled with thousands
upon thousands of cars. Of course, this year, that’s happened even
less frequently than usual. In some cities parking takes up thirty percent
of the land area, writes Eran Ben-Joseph. In Seattle, there are more than 5 parking
spaces per house in the city. Houston has an estimated 30 parking spots
per person. Both cities also have homeless populations
in the thousands. If you look long enough, you will find a parking
spot. That’s not a promise that can be kept if
you’re looking for a home. Unlike buggies, horses, and their waves of
poop, another thing that feels so crushing about cars is that they’ve so decisively
won over every alternative. The Mobility Space Report offers the horrifying
ability to compare the amount of space a city gives to bikes, trains, and cars, both in
terms of parking and lane space. What sucks about this comparison is that it
reminds us that we do have the replacement to the 21st-century-manure-equivalent we’re
drowning under, we do have alternatives, and yet.. The car one will be done soon. I think it’s- I think- okay we’ve gotta
move on, this is taking forever. Cars, especially the increasingly-popular
“light truck” type, make it more dangerous to be a pedestrian every year. As grills keep getting higher and collisions
with people become deadlier, we’re expected to accommodate them. As we continue to get pulled under the wheels
rather than rolling over the top, as speeds in collisions increase, as public walking
spaces diminish, I can’t help but wonder about that hierarchy we’ve put ourselves
in. Flight simulator hands you the yoke and the
sky and makes you feel like a god- but looking down at the ground, and a 1:1 scale model
of earth makes a pretty strong argument as to who the dominant species on the planet
really is. In Jon Bois’ story Football 17776, a character
named Juice has spent millenia- an almost unimaginable number of years- staring down
at cities from above. In the middle of a conversation, he launches
into a characteristically weird piece of trivia: you know, there's some spots in the continental
united states where no human being has ever stood? did you know that? there's a couple hundred places out in the
wilderness, like up in montana and wyoming, where you could draw a circle with a 50-foot
radius and say, "no human has ever walked in that circle." Actually, let me back up for a second. Football 17776 is a long-ish internet multimedia
short story by SB Nation editor/video-maker/prolific tweeter Jon Bois. It is, in my opinion, one of the best sci-fi
stories ever written. It is also free and online, so make choices
accordingly. I won’t spoil too much, but you shouldn’t
need the threat of spoilers to read this thing. Anyway. So in Football 17776, humans have stopped
aging and reproducing, ended disease, ended war, cannot die. This largely happened around the year 2026. Since then, for the next 15,000 years, they’ve
mostly chilled. They play a lot of (american) football. They perpetually hang out. Our perspective on this story is not a human
one though. We read the thoughts and conversations of
three satellites, Pioneer 9, Pioneer 10, and the Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer, also named
Juice. The satellites have been flying for so long,
and alone for so long, that they...develop consciousness. They don’t do anything super impactful with
that consciousness, nor should they really. It’s a story about finding a sort of zen. The satellites too, perpetually hang out. And Juice looks at cities from above. in suburban chicago theres this office park. its one of those office parks you see all
over the place that has a pond next to it for some reason. its not a real pond, it's just a hole they
dug and filled with water and stocked with fish. who knows why, what really gets me is the space just on the
back side of this particular office park. it's this long narrow lawn right next to the
buildings. theres a sidewalk nobody ever walks on. like honestly, someone uses that sidewalk
once every 30 or 40 years. this is what i call a "forgotten lawn." during
the warm months some dude'll come and cut the grass on a riding lawnmower. now, with a lot of forgotten lawns, every
few decades the mower will break down, or there'll be some giant stick and they have
to get off the lawnmower and go throw it into the bushes. not here. not this lawn. they laid down the grass in 1999. in the 15,777
years since, nobody has ever directly stepped on it. Chicago isn’t empty in Football 17776. There are still as many people as there ever
were. Far from post-apocalyptic, 17776 is almost
post-utopian, people settled into routines that they’re more or less satisfied in for
the rest of their infinite lives. This story, from Juice, isn’t even meant
as some dire warning- to them, it’s significant only in context of a game where a football
is shot out of a big cannon in Alaska (it’s complicated, just read the story). And yet, jumbled in all this space and football
and future fiction, you have this brilliant little microcosm in the form of a forgotten
lawn. A vacuum that exists within these areas supposedly
bustling with life, the roads well-worn, the lawns neglected. And the delivery of the story, too, mirrors
the marvel and alienation of the modern age. A perspective on our earth only possible through
technology that would seem impossible a few decades ago. A view from 10,000 feet, looking down on anything
in the world we could ever want to see, and yet one that only reveals detachment. A lawn in front of an office building, more
alien than even the satellites in this story. It’s easy for me to linger in the melancholy
of these sorts of things- it’s not the first time I’ve done so, it certainly won’t
be the last. What’s so phenomenal about 17776 is how
warm and comforting it is, more optimistic than it has any right to be. It uses its perspective, thousands of years
in the future and millions of miles away, to wrap humanity up in this warm little bow,
provide a little comfort in the form of an earth that, to me, is harder and harder to
imagine. In 17776, humans are still living basically
as they did 15,000 years ago. To them, it might seem like nothing’s changed
at all. It’s only from our perspective that we can
appreciate the whole thing. Call it Carl Sagan Syndrome, Blue Marble-itis. I think about that a lot these days. The anti-apocalypse is something I guess I
really need in my life right now. Even with how touching this story is, there
are some things 17776 just can’t avoid. One of the times it touches on cities without
people is Juice’s explanation of the forgotten lawn. The other time is- Hey did you know that this April, for the
first time in 30 years, people in Punjab, India could see the Himalayas from their streets? Can you imagine? You’ve lived somewhere your entire life,
and suddenly you wake up one morning and walk outside and your fundamental sense of the
world you live in changes? Realizing how much beauty has always existed
so near to you, and yet you weren’t able to see it? I get choked up even thinking about it. There’s a reason this happened this April,
of course. India had been in lockdown for just over two
weeks- industries closed, planes out of the air, cars off the street. PM10 air pollution, a measure that refers
to the number of airborne particulates less than 10 micrometers in diameter, reduced 44%
in the FIRST DAY. It took two weeks of shutdown to make visible
what had been hidden for decades. It’s tempting, I know, to take this in an…unsavory
direction. To dip a toe into ecofascism, to imply that
maybe humans are the real virus, man. But it wasn’t humans putting those particulates
into the air. The people are, for the most part, still around. It’s just the rest of the city that stopped
long enough to give us a glimpse into the stunning world that we live in. The roads emptied of cars and instead full
of people experiencing a moment together. The beautiful, optimistic side of Flight Simulator
offers a peek into this world too. Though nothing on this screen will ever match
the majesty of the genuine article, the ability to magically clear the skies and blow away
the smog is another anti-apocalyptic fantasy that I cling to. You can even take cars off the streets- though
you can’t rip up the streets themselves. One of the absolute best things about Flight
Simulator is it lets you see the sheer reckless abandon with which people have chosen locations
to live. Any island with a house on it is amazing,
mountains with huts on top are incredible, humans living on the borders of deserts and
oceans and cliffs are just lost in the landscape and I adore it. Then I think back to 17776 and remember the
other way to get lost in a landscape. One of the times it touches on cities without
people is Juice’s explanation of the forgotten lawn. The other time is New York. In the world of this story, people have stopped
aging and stopped dying. They’ve ended disease and war. But there’s no coming back for New York-
or the east coast, for that matter. Did you know that Microsoft Flight Simulator
2020 can implement real-life weather patterns basically as they happen? Not only can you see your house, you can see
the weather that’s actually happening outside your house, right at the moment you’re playing
it. Or you can track the hurricanes of unprecedented
power that continue to hit the coast, year after year. You can follow along as the summers get hotter
and the winters get more unpredictable. You can fly over the rocky expanses where
there used to be glaciers. Microsoft Flight Simulator is based off of
Microsoft’s own Bing Maps of the world, ones that will presumably be updated in time,
where we’ll be able to see new skyscrapers climb towards the sky- and new coastline roll
into where used to be land. Football 17776 doesn’t really dwell on tragedy. And to be fair, there’s not that much to
dwell on. Everyone’s doing pretty much fine, suffering
has really been downsized to mild annoyance at best. But the twist in my stomach when the satellite
view spins out to sea is something I just can’t shake. Did you know there’s a phenomenon called
a “volcanic sunset?” It’s when a volcano explodes and blows so
much stuff into the atmosphere that it affects how light filters down to us. Volcanic sunsets can be stunning, so much
so that you can trace their influence through art. Edvard Munch’s The Scream can be traced
back to Krakatoa itself, the volcano that killed 36,000 people and was heard almost
3,000 miles away. Munch saw the sky over Oslo, and described
it as such. I was walking along the road with two friends—then
the Sun set—all at once the sky became blood red— and I felt overcome with melancholy. I stood still and leaned against the railing,
dead tired— clouds like blood and tongues of fire hung above the blue-black fjord and
the city. My friends went on, and I stood alone, trembling
with anxiety. I felt a great, unending scream piercing through
nature. There’s an uncomfortable kinship we share
with volcanoes. Both able to demolish ecosystems, change atmospheric
composition, inspire great art. Both able to create cities without people. The difference between the annihilation of
a volcano and the annihilation we’ve been slowly building towards since...is that we
can see ours coming. And while this means it’s inexcusable that
we’ve built our own Vesuvius, it also means that we have the power to prevent a situation
where the shells of bodies litter the streets for future historians to find. Just as in 17776, we DO have the power to
get everyone out, rehouse the entire population. This is not a fantastical goal. This is achievable. It doesn’t even require us to magically
stop aging first. Humans matter more than concrete. Full stop. But still. In my more apocalyptic episodes, when I think
about our future, the future of the coasts, what the next decade and century and millennium
will look like, the grand virtual earth of Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 morphs into
something else entirely. It leaves its role as simulation. It becomes a monument. Yes, all the inhumanity built into our constructed
worlds remains. The highways through natural wonders, the
resorts built on mountaintops. The concentrated animal feeding operations,
the refineries, the earth cracked open like a raw wound. But the sheer tenacity remains as well. The bones and arteries of our civilization. The gleaming cities on the edge of the sea I mentioned before that the game may update
its maps as geography changes, but maybe it should just leave it frozen in time. So when the oceans roll in, when pollution
once again darkens the sky, we’ll have a record of what it felt like. To fly above the empty streets. You might have picked up on the fact that
I use fiction to deal with...allllll this. And, thanks to this video’s sponsor, Audible,
my coping mechanisms are easier than ever! Recently, I’ve found comfort in Ted Chiang’s
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what I love about 17776- it feels of its moment without subscribing to the doom n gloom writing
that’s so easy for this kind of work to fall into. There’s a story about putting chips in your
head, and also the discovery of written language that’s like, the anti-black mirror. It is so cool and thoughtful and just one
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report back and tell me what you thought. Please.
