Monumentality

foreign [Music] when i started this channel i expected i would get maybe a hundred thousand subscribers in about five years a little bit more than four years later i made it to five hundred thousand and a year and a half after that we're here although this channel has exceeded my expectations almost no part of it was easy there were many problems i had to solve and many missteps and errors along the way but i eventually found a path for myself a type of content i enjoyed making and you guys enjoyed watching and now we're here at 1 million subscribers [Music] 15 million 485 thousand 863 is the millionth prime number only 10 cities in the united states are populated by a million or more people it takes one million years for glass to decompose this is 1 million in tiny dots [Music] if you added up all the works in the collections of the luvra the museum of modern art and the documented works in the inventories of the smithsonian american art museum you would be just shy of one million works of art there is no doubt that one million is a big number big things interest me i would say people in general have a tendency to be interested by big things the biggest store the biggest pumpkin the biggest planet the biggest galaxy there are numerous roadside attractions that people like to visit just because they feature objects that are bigger than they usually are but it isn't just big things in a vacuum that interests people but also the way different size things relate to each other in an ever-increasing scale the very first notable video i know of that deals with this idea is the 1977 short film powers of ten the final version of the film is a work by fame designers charles and ray eames the film zooms in and out through the scales of the universe by you guessed it powers of ten since then there have been numerous forms of visual media that play with this idea believe me scale is something worthy of your contemplation if you look into a dense patch of grass really stare into it you'll notice an entirely other world from the one you occupy it's filled with insects root systems particles of dirt it's a place that you are almost entirely cut off from simply because the size at which you live your daily life is so dramatically different if you were to shrink down to the size of an ant blades of grass would become overwhelming towers and the distance from the sidewalk to your front porch would feel like miles and then if you stood up and looked out at a field you'd start to realize just how big the world of the tiny actually is this is the world you currently occupy and if you zoom out of that and look at the world at the scale of a planet we become like the ants again it seems that when we zoom in or out a sense of harmony and pattern emerges each scale is a different world with different rules on the atomic and subatomic level things seem to behave mechanically in ways totally alien to the ways we observe in our world at the level of cells and at the level of insects the inner mechanics of the natural world are revealed on the level of great technological giants of skyscrapers of cities there is a world of steel engineering and the wonders of human achievement on the geographical level there are mountains canyons deserts and on a universal level things behave once again in an alien way where matter energy time and distance exist and interact in ways so extreme that we can never fully wrap our minds around them it is these worlds that drive our fascination with scale that beckon us to learn more that beckon us to wonder about those unimaginable things that are billions of times smaller or bigger than us and while the worlds of the very small are certainly worthy of exploration the worlds that interest me the most the ones i know more about and the ones i wish to explore in this video are those just outside our narrow human scale those which cannot be accessed with a microscope but by vehicles or if you are so willing by your own two feet and enough time those worlds which seem to have captivated civilization for millennia those worlds of dizzying heights power prestige achievement and wonder those worlds that are just so gargantuan they can hardly be imagined take a journey with me through the unfathomable [Music] so [Music] before the great stones of stonehenge were erected originally on the site was a circle of 56 timber or stone posts ancient people used this as a cremation cemetery for hundreds of years but at some point someone somewhere thought it wasn't enough when the huge stones we all know and love were erected around 2500 bc the people who made it went through an extraordinary effort to transport and shape these absolutely enormous stones using only simple tools and technologies some of the blue stones in the inner ring of stonehenge have been found to match perfectly with an outcrop in wales meaning they were displaced 160 miles away from their original location the entire operation would have required planning organization and collaboration on a massive scale when the people of rapa nui first carved the now famous moai figures they didn't start out as enormous as we see them today early statues were far smaller but over time and with advancements in technique moai were carved larger and larger most moai are actually far taller than what remains on the surface in fact they kept trying to outdo themselves attempting to carve them at such a scale that they eventually found their limit leaving the largest moai on the island nicknamed el digante still only partially carved out of the volcanic rock if erected it would have stood 72 feet tall the great pyramids of giza are some of the largest and longest lasting ancient structures in human history they've been here for 4 500 years and they will likely be here for thousands more it would take nothing less than a nuclear bomb or the efforts of thousands of people even with today's technology to dismantle every one of the millions of blocks that makes up the burial complex in order to get rid of it it is a testament to one of the greatest collaborations in history tens of thousands of skilled workers from communities all across egypt likely contributed in building them it is estimated that the largest pyramid contains 2.3 million blocks of stone meaning one 2.5 ton block would have to be laid four and a half minutes of every hour 24 hours a day for the entire 20-year time frame it has been believed to have been built in the sheer scale of the project is so impressive that even today no one is really sure exactly how they were built it wouldn't be until 3800 years later that the pyramids were surpassed in height by the central spire of the lincoln cathedral in 1311. then in 1889 it was surpassed by the eiffel tower in the 20th century height records would be beat again and again every few years from the chrysler building to the empire state building to the world trade center to the willis tower and then in the early 21st century they were all blown out of the water by the 1.5 billion dollar burj khalifa in dubai whose title of being the world's tallest building is not just an architectural achievement but a landmark that's been credited with putting dubai on the map and bringing in nearly 20 million visitors to the city each year however if completed it will be overtaken by the jedha tower the first kilometer tall building in the world for now it's only a quarter finished construction began in 2013 but was halted in 2018 when its major backers found themselves cut up in the country's anti-corruption purges the dubai creek tower when completed is said to be 1 000 to 1 350 meters high it's not exactly a full skyscraper as it will only have 20 floors this is also a bit of an issue with the burj khalifa which has 800 feet of non-occupiable space roughly 29 of the building's height regardless the creek tower is still intended to be a landmark that may surpass the jetta tower and put dubai back on the map as the city with the tallest structure if they ever get past the foundation in 1956 frank lloyd wright no stranger to ambitious projects proposed a 528 skyscraper he called the illinois according to his proposal it would be over a mile tall and would have had enough room for a hundred thousand people fifteen thousand cars and a hundred helicopters the building would have been constructed using the technologies available at the time reinforced concrete steel a tripod design and a taproot structural system which sank a central concrete mass deep into the ground and cantilevered floors from the mast he even alluded to the elevators being atomically powered the illinois would have been a symbol of power and luxury aiming to consolidate all the scattered government offices around chicago at the time however with no client no confirmed sight and considering its outlandish scale it was never built alright that should be it right i mean a mile is pretty tall i don't really see what more height would add to the shimmy zoo mega city pyramid is a theoretical project that if built by the also very theoretical completion date of 2110 would be the largest man-made structure on earth it's not so much a building but a structure that houses other buildings it would sit in tokyo bay and have a footprint of three square miles its height would rise far beyond a mile and it would be able to house one million people the dubai city tower is a 2009 proposal for a 7 900 foot building making it almost three times the height of the burj khalifa and almost seven times taller than the empire state building the main elevator would be replaced by a vertical bullet train the exceed 4000 is a 2.5 mile high conceptual skyscraper with a 3.7 mile wide ocean base with a proposed capacity of 500 000 to 1 million inhabitants the entire thing would use 3 million tons of steel it was designed in 1995 with available materials in mind meaning it could in principle be built today with a check of about a few hundred billion dollars all right that uh that should do it i think the tokyo tower of babel is a six mile high building that if ever built is estimated to house 30 million people and take 100 to 150 years to complete the cost would be in the trillions it is the tallest building ever envisioned right next to my proposal for the bigatron skybuster a 10 mile high carbon nanotube structure which will house 50 million people and will take the fastest elevator in the world nearly 13 minutes to reach the top the estimated cost is 2.3 quadrillion us dollars as i list these off does it seem to anyone that these plans are getting a little bit ridiculous this isn't anything new architects have proposed plenty of super-sized downright megalomaniacal structures before and they are fun little excursions into the realm of dreaming about what human beings may be capable of if they ever want to build a ridiculously big building but in reality most of these proposals are expensive and impractical many of them are not meant to be taken seriously for issues like housing simply putting up bigger buildings is unlikely to single-handedly solve such problems but buildings will get taller and by extension wider as more and more people live in cities we will have to build more and more skyscrapers have been growing taller at a remarkably steady rate and unless sweeping social change occurs which doesn't seem impossible there shouldn't be a drastic change to this trend according to researchers at mit technology review there is a nine percent chance that a building exceeding one mile in height will be built by 2050 and there is a zero percent chance that the current tallest skyscraper will remain the tallest clearly building larger and taller buildings has been on people's minds in the last hundred years especially in tokyo and dubai while skyscrapers often have a practical purpose in their design allowing for a more efficient use of space by moving up instead of out as i just showed many envision projects hell even some of the tallest real buildings today are not a hundred percent practical they are buildings envisioned to show what could be possible they're made to be impressive creating large things building big structures or moving big items is one of the most enduring widespread and prevalent activities in human civilization throughout all of history perhaps even before the development of agriculture humans have been creating structures not simply because they need a place to sleep or because it serves some practical real world function but because they wanted to create a monument but why why do we feel the need to keep building enormous things especially things that serve seemingly no practical function the pyramids do not shield the egyptians from foreign attacks they did not help their crops grow why have we for thousands of years gone through tremendous efforts to build big things well i don't think there's just one answer one of the first reasons is permanence basing things off of what survives in archaeology there's several major ways to create something that lasts as long as possible that is if you also don't want it to be buried somewhere and forgotten by the world one major way is to make it out of durable materials gold will not decay but there's an issue in that since it is also very valuable it runs the risk of being melted down and turned into something completely different stone might be the go-to for this it can't rot it can't catch on fire it's heavy and typically pretty tough another major way is to make it culturally important it could be a religious artifact a burial site something that you instill with so much sacred importance that it will more likely be cared for and maintained and is unlikely to be messed with as long as that culture is still around and another major way is to make it big it's pretty simple really you make something so big so monumentally huge that taking it apart would require nearly as much effort as putting the damn thing together in the first place an effort that even your greatest enemies won't have the energy to go through if you combine all three you get some of the longest lasting structures in human history another reason to build big is that it's a sign of achievement whether that be showing you are the most technologically advanced or that you have enough resources to pull something off it's maybe one of the most obvious and intimidating achievements a society can produce the resources engineering and time required to build something very big even if it's as simple as a mound of dirt will signal to everyone that you or your society can pull off monumental feats another reason could be religion spiritual reasons perhaps you believe by building something very high you can become closer to the gods or if you build something very big you can communicate to them from the ground to the sky or more simply you want to commemorate your god or gods with something that will show others your god is the biggest the most powerful and the best another reason is unity if you are to build something big you're going to need people lots of people and you will need those people to organize to get along and maneuver as one collaboration may help strengthen the relationship between your people and become a more successful society in the long run it may instill in others a sense of purpose inviting people to be part of something bigger than themselves another reason is awe and this is the thing i want to focus on there is an inherent majesty in the huge no matter how primitive or ugly the huge has a spiritual presence that can easily produce fear or respect when someone looks down from a really tall structure it can make one feel dizzy disoriented and fearful but the same thing can happen when you get really close to a skyscraper and look up it's basically the same the perspective recedes in a similar way the distance from ground to ceiling is still mind-boggling some monuments try and chase this tottering feeling perhaps because we live in a world with so many skyscrapers built for practical reasons that would rival important monuments of the ancient world it isn't as amazing to see them but the next time you are in the presence of a skyscraper really look out at it see how just amazingly huge that building is how many times bigger it is than your puny human scale think about all the things that had to come together to create something that can be seen from literal miles away skyscrapers utilitarian or not represent the peak of current architectural ingenuity the peak of industry the peak of human building heights the peak of clogging up the sky creating great walls that block the sunlight and cast suffocating shadows in the 1920s le corbusier an important leader of the modernist movement designed the radiant city a blueprint for a perfectly ordered urban environment le corbusier proposed demolishing two square miles of central paris to build it everything built after would be symmetrical and standardized identical inhuman i wouldn't describe the design as anything other than totalitarian unsurprisingly it was never built but its influence like many things like kubernetes did can still be seen in modern architecture the look of gotham city we all know was influenced by the work of people like hugh ferris hugh ferris was an architectural renderer and theorist who became famous because of his darkly dramatic renderings of skyscrapers monumental blocks that rise out of the earth with a terrifying power the worlds he envisioned included both spacious roads and dense overlapping overwhelming forms the use of light is also remarkable setting the buildings at night and illuminating them with unnatural spotlights evokes the dramatic stage lighting that would accompany a villain's introduction in a play the scale and domination of these images form a playground of gothic fantasy they could also easily be seen as an urban nightmare through modern architecture we have successfully created giants giants that far surpass even the tallest spires of all the cathedrals mosques and churches ever built whose heights were formed to bring us closer to the heavens giants who have a life of their own whose eyes are a thousand blind windows we've created things so big they are no longer entirely within our control that's a bit frightening isn't it megalophobia is the fear of large objects if you legitimately have this condition being in the presence of large things can trigger fear and anxiety the phobia is usually associated with things that are larger than they should be like a larger than life sculpture of a human or an animal grown to a size well beyond its normal natural size like the lassophobia i don't have this condition although i do understand it although a phobia is irrational a little bit of fear around big things is perfectly rational a giant creature or a huge unstable structure could easily kill you but also like the ocean while i have a little bit of fear whenever i encounter big things i also have within me feelings of fascination curiosity and respect humans are one of if not the only animal that as far as we are aware can look out at say the grand canyon and appreciate it just for being beautiful we can take time out of our cycles of eating sleeping and working to just look out at something to contemplate it we can look at nature as if it was a work of art even though i have a fair amount of misanthropy in me i can admit that is special in a sense the grand canyon is a work of art one that illustrates the sheer power of geographic scale in this scale things are typically measured in either miles or kilometers for the longest time i had a hard time really understanding how big a mile was yes one mile is 5280 feet i've walked it i've ran it i've driven it several hundred times but i can never really get the visual confirmation that satisfied me so today that's what we're going to attempt to do so i just bought a measuring wheel that will be able to measure one mile by walking along the beach i bought two poles and and i cut out some cardboard pieces and some red tape that will be our visual signifier for the two ends of the mile so what do you think about my next big video i think this newest solar sands video has great potential for the future of humanity and the world this video may take a long time but it is going to deliver all right i've taped up the signs and i think we're ready to go so we're here at the beach uh the sign is here it's kind of an ominous red i think some people think it's supposed to be a warning sign i probably should have considered that i don't know if it'll work uh it seems pretty far i guess we'll just have to see um so we're going to take the little walkie thing and see how far we can get [Music] okay so we're at 2826 feet we've been going for a long time and it's i i can't see it anymore we saw like a red pixel for a little bit but after that it's just not possible i don't think this is gonna work i think there's too much crowded stuff or the signs just aren't big enough okay this is try two we're uh we have a lot clearer beach now and we're gonna try this one more time see if it'll actually work i'm at about 2 000 feet and i i can't see it oh that's disappointing we're gonna have to do something totally different it was clear i severely underestimated how big a mile was so instead of the signs i decided to use two giant blue tarps that i could place on either end next we drove around the parks of my city looking for a good spot until my brother suggested a long stretch of bayou that he had found on google maps oh my gosh this is 2 300 feet we are putting a lot on the line for this if this bank goes up like two feet we're gonna be underwater but we're almost there if you get over here you can just barely see the bridge you can barely see the bridge i can see a lot i can see it yeah very tiny bit i think this will be enough this is enough we did it we found the mile guys i think this is it we gotta come back later and see if our if it's true preferably in better weather well we're here after significant downpour we're coming back oh boy this is a lot more work than i thought it was going to be a few days later i started prepping one of the tarps at this point i realized that there were probably much easier ways to visualize a mile but i was dead set on making this specific idea work behold our sail in the wind so that morning we gathered our items and drove out to the spot for the last time so we're here my brother has the big blue tarp which will drape over the bridge i have the tarp i can place into the ground i really hope this works it's a sunny day it's in the morning or more like noon now all right so we got the tarp all set up on the bridge okay we're at zero here we go i'm at around 2000 feet and i can still see the blue tarp so that's pretty good sign i'm almost halfway there okay it might be hard to see right now but it says 5250 feet so here we go we're crossing over to some weeds 5272 and here we go five five thousand two hundred eighty feet and i can see it oh i can see a tiny blue pixel out in the distance there it is there's the bridge with the tarp that is one mile all right so solar has just called me saying that he has the second tarp up and i think i can just about see it i don't know if that'll come off on camera but there's a tiny blue thing about the size of a postage stamp way out there and he says he can see this so that's a mile i guess all right now i can definitely see it it's that blue thing while these bluish gray specks may be unconvincing because of the camera quality i can assure you when i viewed my brother's tarp in person the bright blue could clearly be seen both tarps are roughly the same size so my brother's view would have been about the same i guess the lesson in all of this would be a mile is a lot longer than you think okay it's official i just called my brother he can see the tarp and i can see his here it is i'm holding it up because it's way too unstable but there it is one mile to one mile what we just did took a bit of work in fact if i was a little bit more pretentious i would call these two tarps my work of art solar sands one mile conceptual sculpture but there's works of art out there that are far longer than a mile what is the biggest work of art in order to answer this question a few caveats have to be established if we define art as anything people have made then the largest work of art could easily be a city or the great pyramids of giza no what i want to focus on for now is what people traditionally think of as a work of art something made with no other particular purpose than to evoke an emotional reaction the kind of thing that could be hung in a museum or could be constructed by people who say we intend to make a work of art and call it a work of art when it is finished even if we narrow this definition down we're still left with plenty of candidates the largest paintings in art history vary dramatically in theme from monet's water lily series to the birth of venus to the night watch the largest painting in the louvre is paolo veronese's the wedding at cana a 22 foot by 32 foot renaissance era canvas there is a certain point when you scale up a canvas that the painting no longer becomes a window into a scene but is instead allowed to envelop the viewer landscape artists use this to their advantage for a while and for the abstract expressionists huge canvases was one of the few unifying elements of their movement large canvases allowed viewers to become surrounded by their expression and allowed them to take in the work bit by bit in 2020 british artist sasha joffrey created the world's largest painting the journey of humanity a 17 000 square foot canvas painted with splashes of color and dripping as well as incorporating images children around the world had submitted online the work took seven months to complete in the ballroom of a luxury hotel in dubai and is set to be projected onto the burj khalifa i don't think i need to tell you why that building is significant then there are paintings that depict monumental subjects the rise and fall of civilizations famous scenes from history landscapes and architecture etienne louis is one of the most visionary and influential architects whose grand designs were never built his neoclassical visions of libraries cenotaphs and operas are pure architectural imagination gone wild ceilings rise to dizzying heights forests of columns stretch on and on people become insignificant ants the cenotaph for isaac newton is a grand sphere that would have been the tallest building in the world at the time the inside would be hollow allowing for holes to be poked through that simulated stars the space would be so big and encapsulating that it would have essentially felt like the entire night sky was above you these projects are grandiose and grotesquely impractical so huge they seem more fit for titans than people they are monuments of expression to the love of scale they are utopian visions of architecture without limits they are dream worlds that could be explored and experienced endlessly such architecture can also be seen in the work of english romantic painter john martin john martin's works have an incredible apocalyptic sense of scale he was often a painter of historical and religious themes grand biblical events as well as historical cataclysms you can look into these pictures forever as it seems like the entire earth hell even a planet bigger than earth is collapsing around you violent storms take up most of the scenes as tiny figures clamber for survival he also made engravings and mesotents in satan presiding at the infernal council satan sits on a blocky throne on top of an enormous fear as the sheer distance of the space is hinted at by glints of columns and chandeliers one of my favorite paintings of his is belshazzar's feast a scene of the biblical story where the king belshazzar sees the writing of god on the wall of his palace this open air palace is imaginatively exaggerated in scale look at the back of it how those hundreds of columns seem to stretch for infinity think about how lost you could get in such a place above you can see the faint shapes of two monstrosities of buildings a ziggurat on the right and the tower of babel on the left the work was very successful at exhibitions and helped inspire many other grand scenes in one of his later paintings pandemonium john martin renders the long neoclassical capital of hell in all its twisted glory as the landscape churns with fiery death such a structure cannot even fit on the canvas and extends into the darkness of an everlasting hell the nazis were fond of monumental architecture too hitler's plans for berlin's redevelopment were begun by albert speer in 1936. according to the plans in the middle of the city there would be a long and wide avenue flanked with military equipment crossed by a triumphal arch with building compositions of massive proportions on either side broad swaths of the original city would have been raised including historical buildings all of this architecture ended at the footsteps of the massive volk chalet a play on the ancient roman pantheon the dome would have been 16 times higher than the dome of saint peter's and would have been able to hold up to 180 000 people it is said that the dome would be so big inside that when it was packed with chanting nazis their breath would have caused condensation to form on the underside of the dome this could have even formed clouds that allowed rain to fall on the crowds below if you feel seduced by its size even impressed despite their ideology that was certainly their goal the great hall would have been a monument to german supremacy a building born of hitler and albert speer's insane ambitions a symbol of overwhelming power and domination sometimes evil is glorious the scale of architecture can easily make us feel small while buildings are designed in relation to the human scale oftentimes their sheer size can make us forget that but what about the scale of the human body itself there's a lot of jokes about men's height how short men are called manlets how they will never achieve female companionship the napoleon complex is a popular belief that short men tend to compensate for their lack of height through aggressive and domineering behavior however napoleon himself was probably of average height according to french sources napoleon was just an inch or so below the average height for the period coming in at five feet five inches the myth of his shortness was likely popularized by propaganda namely caricatures depicting napoleon as a short raving man but how important is height really according to several studies done within the past few years in general both taller men and women are considered to be more dominant healthy intelligent are more likely to be chosen for competitive jobs and earn more money it also seems that indeed women care more about height than men in one u.s study 13.5 percent of men only wanted to date women shorter than they are 49 of women only wanted to date men taller than they are a second part of the study found results that were similar taller people even seemed to be happier according to a daily us poll tall people evaluate their lives more favorably and are more likely to report a range of positive emotions such as enjoyment and happiness the optimistic person may say that height doesn't actually matter that much there's plenty of fish in the sea that don't care about superficial things like that and maybe that's true but if you're short and planning on running for president you might want to reconsider throughout us history there has been a slight tendency for the winner of the presidential election to be taller than their opponent by around half an inch furthermore it has been 125 years since we elected a president who was shorter than the national average of the american male at the time still there are some downsides to height taller people are likely to be more clumsy will have more distance to fall if they lose their balance and are more prone to injury because a larger body will burn more energy buildup of toxic byproducts can contribute to more wear and tear but that doesn't change the fact that the public perception seems to be biased towards people of higher stature it seems that when it comes to judging people by height we are a lot more shallow than we may believe when we make statues of important people often they are larger than perfectly life size to be big is to be powerful influential three of the top five biggest statues in the world are of buddhas and all five have been completed within the last 30 years the tallest the statue of unity depicts sardar vallabhai patel who served as deputy prime minister and home minister of india during the first three years of indian independence the statue was completed in 2018 and stands 597 feet tall a detailed 3d scan of the largest initial version of the statue was used to create the 6500 bronze plates that make up the outer shell the statue is so big it can be seen from over 4 miles in any direction and even just its toes tower over the average person since it was commissioned it has been heavily criticized for being a waste of taxpayer money however considering all the engineering steps taken to make it impervious to winds up to 110 miles per hour and earthquakes measuring 6.5 on the richter scale as well as the immense effort someone would have to go through to dismantle it safely there is little chance it will be gone anytime soon whether people like it or not by consequence of its sheer size it is here to stay money mentality has surprisingly become even more prominent in contemporary art in fact the largest works of art ever are likely to be completed in our lifetimes in land and environmental art the opportunities for large works of art are even greater christo and john claude were masters of monumental environment art christo started with wrapping small objects like cans and cars but in short time the scale would drastically increase oil barrels and fabric would become important mediums one of the duo's first works of art the iron curtain was a wall of 89 oil barrels stacked nearly 14 feet high a work that closed off a narrow paris street for several hours the barrier was made to protest the berlin wall which had just been built a year earlier throughout the late 60s the duo would wrap buildings like museums and thousands of square feet of fabric this practice turned their attention to shaping and changing the environment around them through extensive planning and logistical feats wrapped coast is the beginning of their truly huge environmental works the work used 1 million square feet of fabric 35 miles of rope and 25 000 fasteners to wrap a 1.5 mile long section of the australian coastline the work transformed the coast in a fundamental way removing color and texture removing the familiarity of a familiar natural setting turning a real coastline into bare shape and form much like a bare 3d model it remained wrapped for 10 weeks this use of fabric would continue with valley curtain a 200 000 square foot orange nylon fabric curtain hung between two colorado mountain slopes it was removed only 28 hours after its completion but if you were lucky enough to have seen it you may have thought you were hallucinating as this huge undulating orange crescent highlighted the landscape their works it seemed would only get bigger running fence consisting of an 18-foot high fence of white fabric that stretched for over 24 miles across the hills of northern california was not only maybe the longest work of art ever but also one of the most difficult to get approved the entire project required 42 months of collaborative efforts including rancher participation public hearings three sessions at the superior courts of california and the drafting of a 450-page environmental impact report many of their works went through similar amounts of scrutiny by authorities the work was a seemingly endless contour of the hills of the sonoma and marin counties a ribbon of light that would have been visible for miles for the two weeks it was allowed to stay up the fence began near highway 101 and ended in the pacific ocean the fabric works would continue wrapping walls wrapping coves wrapping trees surrounding islands in the gates a series of 7503 saffron colored fabric gates were installed in new york central park weaving between the trees like a golden river jean-claude died in 2009. christo would continue the art under the duo's name with works like floating piers in italy a huge dock of yellow fabric carried by a system of 220 000 high-density polyethylene cubes the oil barrels would eventually return the london mastoba was a temporary sculpture in hyde park comprised of 7506 stacked oil barrels on a floating platform the sculpture weighed 660 tons and its footprint covered approximately one percent of the surface of the lake in 1977 after running fence was completed an even more monumental sculpture was conceived a mastaba to be placed in abu dhabi made out of 410 000 oil barrels if completed it will be 492 feet high just slightly taller than the great pyramids at giza making it the largest single sculpture in the world christo died in 2020 a little bit more than a year from today but the foundation continues throughout their careers the pair never received outside funding all their financing was made through the sale of their own artwork according to their website with every project concerning the environment the works were designed to be removed without a trace all sites were returned to their original condition except in one case where 40 tons of garbage was removed from 11 islands in surrounded islands however this did not stop controversy including the accidental death of two people by their umbrella project one umbrella got detached from its stand and crushed a woman and a worker was electrocuted in the process of removing them however the most common complaints from the public about their work was that they were an eyesore to me their works continue to be an inspiring look into our relationship with the environment highlighting the scale and effort required to change even just a mere fraction of the earth's surface christo and jean-claude made works monumental in size and were monumental in character i would like to take the time in this brief intermission to shout out some of the channels that i've enjoyed over my five years on youtube this won't take long and i do want you to at least hear some of these and check them out but if you want to skip this section here's the time code the first channel is model chile scale models watching this guy paint and construct models over several hours is surprisingly both entertaining and satisfying he has a very soft easy going voice and commentary only when necessary which makes his videos very relaxing attention films is a history channel whose most famous videos are civil war related but don't let that overshadow all the other videos which go into those lesser-known stories from history he puts in a tremendous amount of work into these videos and that really needs to be more appreciated art history with travis lee clark is exactly what it says there's a lot of great art content on youtube but not much of it comes close to the amount of information and entertainment that one college professor with a bunch of slides and a digital pen can bring i would just start with the first video on the channel and continue up a lot of you probably already know emplemon he's not a small channel but if you don't know him he's an excellent youtuber that can make pretty much any subject interesting even if you don't care about it solid brick studios makes a bunch of lego content including these mind-blowing mocks he's currently in the middle of a geonosis mock which updates every week and finally theremin trees focuses on going in depth about the nature of abuse manipulation and dogma and has many very strong videos demonstrating how most religious organizations are not that great he also has an extremely unique visual style i haven't really seen anywhere else in 1972 michael heiser began his colossal work city a project he continues to this very day he's been known as a major environmental artist for most of his career some works you may recognize are double negative an earthwork consisting of a 1 500 foot rectangular cut across the top of a mesa and levitated mass a 340 ton granite boulder which took 11 nights to transport over the 105 miles from quarry to museum city is a work more comparable to an architectural complex than a sculpture city is mostly made from materials on site dirt rock and concrete its layout is informed by pre-columbian ritual cities and since 1972 has turned into a vast sprawling park of mounds blocks triangles and negative space it's been under construction for 49 years and has shrouded itself in mystery with the help of its remote geographic location and hyzer secrecy michael govan the director of the los angeles county museum of art said back in 2016 that the site would admit its first visitors from the general public in 2020 at this point it seems more likely heiser will die before it is called complete it is currently the largest piece of contemporary art in existence if you were to explore a city it would probably take you several days to become acquainted with it to see all its sculptures to walk past all its major mounds if you really wanted to know it you would have to spend several days exploring every detail of its forms if you really wanted to know everything about it from the technical construction to the changes it underwent to the tons of material that has ever been moved on the site if you really wanted to know about a project that big you would need several weeks what does it mean to know something when someone says they know it like the back of their hand that's a pretty understandable saying because the back of your hand is this small fleshy thing that's usually right in front of you all day long people feel that they know their hand exceptionally well but what does it mean to know your house well in this case people also think they know their homes pretty well but we'd be kidding ourselves if we thought we knew our homes to the exact same extent as our hands you probably don't know the exact placement of every piece of furniture every outlet have you ever been on a cruise ship you're usually on one of those things for five days and the entire time you're doing activities running around from floor to floor eating meals and playing games i was on a cruise ship once i explored it for five days and by the time the five days were up there was still probably a quarter of the ship i had never even stepped foot in some of that was areas that only employees could enter and the others were just places i didn't get to go to five days mostly exploring and i still didn't really know all the rooms and areas it had i still hadn't given even a moderate amount of attention to hundreds of elements that's what happens when you try to know something that enormous but what does it mean to know your city i live in a pretty big city and there's many hundreds of buildings and streets i will probably never drive down never visit and yet i feel like i know my city i really only know some parts of it in detail and how they connect with other detailed parts but as a whole i really don't know my own city most of it is just a concept an idea of a city that contains thousands and thousands of elements that i will never explore in detail and yet exists in some abstraction in my head the parts that are missing are just imagined based off of what i do know i have an illusion of knowing what my city is this is a transmission tower there's hundreds of these in my city you can see them extending over there and over there what gets me about it is that it plays such a minor role it supports power lines it's like a single puzzle piece in a puzzle that contains a hundred thousand pieces and yet look at how big it is it's got to be 90 to 100 feet high anything like this in the ancient past would be difficult to achieve even if it played a big role but it just plays a tiny tiny part in the huge mind-boggling human creation that is a city i don't think i ever really understood the scale of the earth until i looked out and saw the other side of the grand canyon this experience is also the first time i understood what people meant when they said photos didn't do something justice i mean just holy cow the grand canyon is big 18 miles was in front of me i could see how the atmosphere made the other side blue i could see how the sunlight made the rock shimmer with a million different colors when you look out at something like that it's kind of hard to wrap your mind around it when things get that big that huge it challenges what it means to know something i don't know the grand canyon and i don't have an illusion of knowing it i've only gone down a few of its trails i've never reached the bottom and i've never actually touched the other side but even if i did hike every trail even if i did walk along all at serpentine cliffs a process that would take several months i think i would still fall short of truly knowing it there would still be places that are untouchable or require immense difficulty to get to again i would just have an illusion of knowing it and that just leaves me to ask how well do we know the earth humanity thinks it knows the planet earth we've migrated across this planet's lands for thousands of years we've compiled tales from adventurers and explorers over hundreds of years we have scientists who tell us about the state of its climate but we don't know the earth much of the amazon basin remains unexplored more than 80 percent of the ocean remains unexplored there are cave systems that bend twist taper and sprawl out in such extreme ways we might never be able to explore them by foot even in the year of 2021 satellite imagery discovers new things the earth is simply too big for anyone to ever possibly traverse even its surface before they died there comes a point where something becomes so big and complicated it is practically unknowable we can only understand it in broad classifications the sahara desert a planet the solar system the milky way galaxy trying to understand something that big is like trying to imagine living for a million years you simply can't it's beyond our capabilities it's beyond our narrow human experience fiction however allows us to explore the world of the huge with more freedom star wars has always had a good sense of scale from the very first scene we see the tiny tant of four being chased by the underbelly of the gargantuan imperial star destroyer this scene establishes one fact that the empire is huge and intimidating and their ships are huge and intimidating the classic imperial star destroyer is one of my favorite if not my favorite ships out of all of star wars i've always associated the star destroyer with scale as the wedge-shaped giant that could never be surpassed until of course it was its iconic wedge-shaped design is surprisingly simple and it feels believable even though if you analyzed it as a serious space warfare vessel it probably wouldn't make a whole lot of sense almost all of the spaceships in star wars are well designed their shape language is so perfect their silhouettes so easy to recognize and the sheer imagination and diversity of designs is well even though star wars may be the most over-appreciated franchise in history i still feel like these designs aren't talked about enough my love of them is deepened further by this book star wars the essential guide to vehicles and vessels this was one of my favorite childhood car ride reading books and i remember it being kind of hard to find i had initially flipped through the droid version at a stand before but couldn't buy it so i searched for it at any bookstore we visited until i eventually found it again at a half-price bookstore this then led me to the ship version what i like about this book is the ships are presented in a bare bones sketchy way with accompanying orthographics which adds this touch of realism they're presented as if they were at one point actually manufactured all the illustrations are detailed and dynamic but i think my favorite is of course this one i love this tilted angle like the star destroyer is careening away from a high-powered laser beam you can feel its weight when i look at this thing all i want to do is zoom in on those tiny tiny specks of light which i can only assume are windows and think to myself i could spend weeks exploring this vessel unfortunately we never really got to see the inner workings of it in detail in the original films we saw the bridge at a few points and maybe a hangar bay but surely there's more to it there has to be hundreds of hallways and rooms to maintain and run this vessel what on earth would those look like i always romanticized it like a cruise ship i wish i could spend a few weeks exploring every room every turn every part of its labyrinth when i look at concept art for huge futuristic structures sometimes i wonder what would happen if i did have the time if i could live the lifetimes required to explore and know these vast complexes how they were built what details could be discovered and the kinds of events that occurred in them i dream about experiences i know i'll never have the closest thing to taking a more detailed peek inside a star destroyer and the original series would be the scenes in the death star in a new hope the super weapon or super weapons that take the cake for the biggest original trilogy megastructures in star wars although the death star is many times bigger i have a unique fascination with the scale of a star destroyer for one thing i could probably explore all the areas of a star destroyer within a reasonable amount of time unlike the death star secondly i always imagined there was a greater diversity of rooms and functional areas than the death star because realistically with its main function being a super weapon i assume most of it would be filled with either empty space or machinery thirdly i think to my child mind i got a better understanding of its true scale by the opening comparison with the tantive seeing that tiny ship which is actually also pretty big in comparison to the full hulking mass of a star destroyer was just so impactful this is one of the reasons those size comparison videos are so addicting the use of comparing something to things we already know gives a much more satisfying and mind-blowing feeling as opposed to mere measurements you'd better believe my excitement when i found out about star destroyer ships even bigger than the classic imperial destroyers of course most of these were never in the original trilogy this is also where i found out about the expanded universe where apparently palpatine came back which means we can't blame disney entirely for bringing back palpatine there was historical precedent but how they brought him back with little to no explanation is still pretty dumb somehow palpatine returned despite the force despite the fact most ship designs wouldn't work well in the vacuum of space i always felt the original world of star wars was kind of feasible it never pushed things too far the death star is not even described as being the size of a moon but a small moon i could easily see how a galaxy spanning empire at the peak of its power could gather enough resources to build something like that a criticism of the return of the jedi is that a second death star is just a lazy repeat of the first death star for lack of a more imaginative concept however this kind of makes sense if you have the plans all set up for a super powerful technology that was only foiled because of an easily fixable flaw why wouldn't you just try it again the original trilogy always had a good believable sense of scale about their technology and their worlds i don't even think the prequels strayed much from having believably huge structures the only trilogy that breaks this is disney's which doesn't even respect the distance of planets in the last jedi they introduce what i believe is the biggest star destroyer in history the supremacy which is just gargantuan with a wingspan of 37 miles and a crew of 2 million apparently the largest star destroyer in history is funded and built by the first order who i thought were supposed to be less powerful than the empire maybe i could buy a starkiller base and maybe i could buy a supremacy but both that's not happening it becomes clear disney just wanted the empire 2 without thinking of the world building that would require and then you have the rise of skywalker which takes a classic imperial star destroyer and makes a thousand of them with very little justification for how palpatine even got them what's even more lazy about it all is that they apparently just scaled up a regular star destroyer and put a cannon on it let me say that again they didn't make it longer they didn't redesign it to be bigger they took a regular star destroyer and scaled it up resulting in absurdly large windows shield bulbs a nonsensically large bridge a myriad of issues you can't just scale up a vessel and expect everything to work the same way the resurgent class star destroyer actually improved the previous version you're telling me palpatine built an entirely new type of star destroyer and didn't bother to make any differences besides the canon and size the very scene this design is featured in is easily one of the most ridiculous scenes in all of star wars tightly packing together star destroyers with no sense of strategy or explanation multiplying everything with little to no justification isn't providing a sense of scale it's warping and destroying it i think that's enough about star wars the point is i think there's an art to providing a strong sense of scale in your story that's part of the reason i like star destroyers another reason i like them a star destroyer's length is just a little bit less than a mile megastructures in space are typically thought of as very large artificial objects that approach or achieve orbital planetary and stellar scale there are a few fictional franchises that have megastructures as major plot points and even fewer that explore them in depth in the hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy earth itself is a megastructure intended to function as a huge computer built by an alien race that manufactures planets the video game franchise halo is filled with megastructures the halo rings from which the franchise gets its name are massive habitable superweapons 6 200 miles in diameter these are dwarfed by the ark a structure which uses planetoids in the center for material for building halos in the sonic series there is the eclipse cannon capable of destroying planets and piercing stars in bionicle wait am i reading that right yeah that's right in bionicle matanui is a massive robot as tall as a planet and inside his body every inhabitant of the bionicle universe all live unaware that they live inside a massive space traveling entity i thought this was just a lego action figure theme i knew it had lore but i never thought it was this dense it kind of makes you wonder if every inhabitant of the bionicle universe lived in one planet tall being without knowing it then how long would it take for just one of them to cross that being subsequently how long would it take to walk around the earth well contrary to popular notions the earth is not perfectly spherical the circumference of the equator of the earth is about 41 miles longer than the circumference of the poles if there were no oceans and you didn't sleep or rest you would be able to walk through the poles of the earth at the average walking speed of 3.1 miles per hour in about 334 days walking around the equator would take about 335 days if you factored in sleep sleeping once a day for 8 hours it would take you about 502 days if you were to walk around the equator of jupiter without stopping it would take you 3668 days that is 10 years of walking if you were to walk around the equator of the sun without stopping it would take you 36 497 days almost exactly 100 years it would take a significantly above average length with technology however the time is significantly shortened a car going 80 miles per hour can travel around the earth in 13 days jupiter 142 days and the sun in 3.87 years the international space station orbits the earth in about 93 minutes when i was young very young and i first learned that in our solar system the earth was actually very small compared to nearly half the planets i was pissed oh great we got a raw deal our world is only like the sixth biggest of course at this time i didn't know that jupiter was made of gas and the other planets were unsuitable for life it wasn't until a few years later that i became grateful our planet wasn't that huge that for all its deserts and jungles and forests we could still travel to them it wouldn't take us four years to reach the north pole if our civilization was spread out over the size of jupiter the world would feel spectacularly more isolated [Music] the story in the manga blam is very simple a character by the name of kylie makes his way through a vast megastructure in search of the net terminal gene along the way he encounters safeguards other people and all kinds of enormous constructions many would describe the genre of blam as sci-fi cyberpunk i would also describe it as apocalyptic horror many would say the main character of blam is kylie i would also say it is the city while there are extravagantly designed monsters cool technologies and a few other characters the main attraction of the series has to be the all-encompassing architecture of the city so many pages are dedicated to kylie just walking through it walking down its hallways climbing up its towers getting knocked around a structure that never ever ends oh spoilers i guess from here the horror of it all is partially that everything killing encounters is a ghastly abomination but more importantly the feeling that something can be so big that it is inescapable that humanity has been spread so far apart by this unforgivable structure that there is no hope of regular beings ever coming together and fighting back against the overwhelming domination of automated builders that continue to expand it it is never made clear how long kylie spends trying to find the net terminal gene my guess is that he walks through the city for hundreds if not thousands of years at some point in the story there's this very short scene where he takes an elevator with an ai the ai says your destination is updated to block 40-7 ke distance is about 780 kilometers it will be at least 800 hours for those of you who don't know that's about 33 days that has to be but a tiny fraction of the time kylie has to wait at some point a room is revealed to have a diameter roughly the size of jupiter in the prequel noise it is revealed that the megastructure at one point swallowed the moon and kept continuing the structures he encounters are nothing short of tremendous sculptures carved by the pen of tsutsomu nihei great giants formed by builders with defective ideas of habitable architecture who create stairs and hallways that lead nowhere that create dangerously high walkways with no railing and throughout your journey through this 3d labyrinth of nonsense the prevailing thought on your mind is this world is just too big to ever be known the universe as i'm sure you all know is big so big that all human beings living or dead can't imagine its size all we have are the numbers and those numbers contain a lot of zeros the very idea of a light year is pretty hard to grasp on the human scale the speed of light may as well be instantaneous you're telling me in space distances are so great light takes years to travel the distance to our next nearest star proxima centauri is 4.25 light years the eagle nebula is 7 000 light years from earth there you can find the pillars of creation a formation of gas and dust where newborn stars hide in their ethereal sculptural columns the formation is roughly four to five light years long the earth is smaller than the visible universe by about twenty powers of ten an atomic nucleus is smaller than the earth by 20 powers of 10. the smallest possible measurement according to all known physics is the planck length the emphasis here is on known according to the fermi lab if it turns out that at very small lengths some other version of quantum mechanics manifests itself or the law of gravity differs from our current theory the argument falls apart and of course the observable universe is all the universe we can observe a space 93 billion light years across it could be even larger it could be infinite this idea of the universe going on forever in both directions large and small probably wouldn't have been something supported by people like einstein who believed that nature could be reduced to a finite set of equations but it would be supported by people like german physicist emil weakert who wrote in 1896 we know precisely that the atoms with which we are dealing are in no sense the simplest conceivable components of the universe on the contrary the number of phenomena lead to the conclusion that atoms are very complicated structures so far as modern science is concerned we have to abandon completely the idea that by going into the realm of the small we shall reach the ultimate foundations of the universe i believe we can abandon this idea without any regret the universe is infinite in all directions not only above us in the large but also below us in the small if we start from our human scale of existence and explore the content of the universe further and further we finally arrive both in the large and in the small at misty distances where first our senses and then even our concepts fail us what do we make about the scale of the universe the way i see it there are two ways to approach this undeniably small scale we live in on the pessimistic side we are so insignificant that our planet could be washed away like a single grain of sand on a beach and from the perspective of the universe nothing would change we would be a blip in a pointless infinite matter smashing simulator on the optimistic side we are part of something so complex and so large that we are like a single tiny cog in a machine with a construction so incomprehensible we may never know its purpose you would have to have faith that we are part of something larger than ourselves and that every action you make although small matters both are pretty terrifying but i reject the notion we can never make a dent through our technology through our perseverance through our collaboration we could make ourselves bigger the kardashev scale is a way of measuring a civilization's technological development based on how much usable energy it can manipulate and store a type 1 civilization is a civilization that can harness all the energy on its home planet a type 2 civilization is a civilization that is able to harness the energy of its sun a type 3 civilization is a civilization that can harness the energy of its galaxy one of the most popular proposed methods of achieving type 2 is through a dyson sphere a huge structure or series of structures that encompasses a sun and harnesses its energy the idea of dyson spheres at first wasn't the result of cold calculation in a scientific paper freeman dyson was inspired by science fiction in the novel star maker by ola stapledon there are many types of dyson spheres the classical dyson sphere is an absolutely gigantic closed-off sphere completely encircling the sun and blocking off all its light and energy although as much as i like the idea this is the most gravitationally unstable and material wasting design you could possibly make freeman dyson championed more so a dyson swarm a spherical shape made from trillions and trillions of individual solar collecting satellites orbiting in rings dyson spheres bring up many questions if our population increases as our energy needs exceed that which exists on earth is building a dyson sphere and inevitability it is perfectly possible that in the next few thousand years we find a way to harness the energy of the sun in a way that is far more efficient and less costly than even a dyson swarm that doesn't take away the wonder of such a structure however if it really does turn out to be inevitable then that means building a dyson sphere is inescapably linked to the fermi paradox if it was a structure worth building a sufficiently advanced alien civilization should have a dyson sphere surrounding their home star this would produce unusual dimming which could be seen by astronomers so far no such dimming or any other unusual light signatures have been observed with no non-alien explanations larry niven's ring world is not my favorite book i think there was a lot more focus on characters than i expected but when it does talk about the ring world the details are fascinating in the book a group of two aliens and two humans embark on a mission to visit what is essentially a thin slice of a classic dyson sphere a continuous ring with continents and oceans on the inside with a circumference of 600 million miles the outside of the ring is not flat but dented with a myriad of shapes indentations for mountains and bulges for oceans an inner ring is formed of shadow squares that rotate within the outer ring to produce the cycles of day and night the group eventually find themselves stranded on the surface and have to travel hundreds of thousands of miles to get to the ring wall a mountainous wall designed to keep the air in the habitable inner surface of the ring world is 3 million times the surface area of the earth the oceans are several times as large as earth there is enough room on the ring world to get quite thoroughly lost the primitive civilizations that survived after the fall of the ringworld civilization are spread so far apart that their languages differ and they never ever appear to meet a dyson sphere shell built to the size of earth's orbit would have an interior 600 million times the surface area of earth an area so large that if you spread everyone all 7.9 billion people out equally every person would have an area six times the surface area of the united states before they ever saw another person this is the kind of phenomena we'd have to deal with if we ever approached building something as big as a dyson sphere i think to keep ourselves mentally healthy we would choose to build habitable structures only as big as the planet earth whatever form the dyson sphere takes it will inevitably be the biggest structure in human history up to that point it would require engineering feats on a level that's hard to imagine it would require the dismantling of planets such as mercury which is rich in iron and oxygen it would require automation producing robots that would build other robots to build components for the dyson sphere it would probably require an ai to gather materials and organize those millions of building robots the origins of the megastructure in blom is like many things in the story never made clear all that is said is that an ai has lost our control and builds the megastructure endlessly but i think the only thing that makes sense the only reason human beings would create an ai with such powerful building capabilities and then would allow that ai to create something that huge without us finding out something went wrong until it was too late is nai originally made to build a dyson sphere it has been suggested by tsutsomu nihei himself that the world of blam is actually just a growing dyson sphere if you were to walk around the equator of a dyson sphere without stopping it would take you 21 500 years if we are to ever build a dyson sphere let's hope we have good control of whatever tool we use to build it it seems that if we are to advance to colonize space to gather energy to create the technology that will propel us into a new era we must build bigger a dyson sphere is one of the most extreme examples of this but things like o'neill cylinders large rotating habitats that produce artificial gravity and huge colonizing spaceships may also be inevitable the construction of such space vessels would likely require the collaboration of billions of people in a world that is far surpassed the petty squabbles that currently take up our day-to-day lives the construction of a dyson sphere would not only be a great technological achievement but possibly the greatest and last human collaborative achievement before our race splintered out and spread across the galaxy the primary purpose of a dyson sphere would be to accelerate our energy harnessing abilities to bring human civilization to the next level but do you think we as human beings would leave it at that do you think we would build the biggest thing in the solar system and leave it at that if such a thing was ever built it would it should be beautiful it should be built as a monument a monument to human collaboration to human achievement to all the scientists to all the animals we experimented on you'd better believe it'd be a monument to the solar system once we're done with it it would be a monument to all the great movers that came before to all the stories and art that helped us persevere through the challenges of life to awe it would be a monument to everything [Music] um [Music] well that's the video um probably won't be making something like this for a while probably won't be making videos in general for a little while i'm a bit tired so in honor of this video's theme i will be building brick volts imperial star destroyer mock it is twice as many pieces as the coliseum and will be the largest lego set i've ever constructed thank you for a million subscribers my name is solar sands and goodbye [Music] you

Channel: Solar Sands

Views: 1,272,114

Keywords: Solar Sands, Monumentality, Art, Drawing, Painting, Star Wars, Big, Dyson sphere, sci fi, Blame!

Id: bwGKqiOyIAM

Length: 81min 46sec (4906 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 14 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/Roughy]

Timestamp

[u/vorsaki]

I'm so glad that blame seems to be getting much more popular. It's rare to see anyone talking about blame, it's nice to see such a fast growing, popular channel, talk about it.

[u/coltglitch]

I saw solar sands comment on von hohenheim’s blame unofficial ost videos a couple weeks back asking to use one of his songs in a video where he’ll have a small segment of him mentioning blame!, so that ruined the surprise for me lol

[u/ElsiMain]

What a coincidence, Im watching this video at this very moment, and I happen to stumble upon your post just now.