Steampunk Pandora

I'm building this image in my mind, a giant collection of spreadsheets and graphs and sketches and photographs, of a 5,000 foot mountain with a network of 1,000 ft, 2,000 ft trees and several mountain peaks. The trees are a living network of human habitats and workspaces, intermingled with the usual birds and squirrels and insects, cats and dogs, and pathways for bicycles and vehicles and feet. There are stores and bars and office spaces, garages and sheds and parking spaces too. A regular modern day city transposed onto - into - a living forest-city. With plumbing and electricity and places to store food. Stuff. Regular everyday things.

The mountain peaks of this forest-city have been specifically designed to contain lightning rods that harvest lightning, which jump-start generators on power stations that use virtually no power once they've been jump-started, and so can run on lightning power alone, with clean solar, wind, and hydro power as emergency backups. This network of city-trees glows luminescent at night, lighting the forest-city, each tree is as tall as the Empire State Building or Taipei 101 or the Burj Dubai and can house equally as many people.

An extremely high-density organic city.

The trees are key.

It's very similar to Home Tree and Pandora, the fictional settings for the movie Avatar, though I had this idea before the movie came out. A living tree-skyscraper. I'm sure a ton of people have had the same idea before, it's not shockingly original. But it's still a great idea and I've yet to see practical plans, so it's still just sitting there waiting to be fully realized, fully created. It's funny what can pop out of the collective unconscious like that. It's something I think about a lot. It feels like something I need to create, need to build for myself, though I have no idea how. I can barely wrap my  mind around the concept, never mind the inception, the practical application of it.

I have a notebook from 2008 where I detailed the world's tallest trees (coast redwood at >400ft tall), mountains (mount Kea, or Everest, each around thirty thousand feet tall), the world's oldest and largest living organism (posidonia oceanica, 8km long, 100k+ years old), the world's largest fungal colony (2,200 acres @ 2,400 years old @ 605 tons, give or take), and the world's largest tree colony (Pando "The Trembling Giant" Aspen Grove, 107 acres, 6k tonnes, Utah, USA).

Coast redwoods can reach almost 400 feet in height.

The largest Giant Sequoias (below) are 300 feet high and 30 feet in diametre.

Eucalyptus regnans (left, below) also grow to about 300 feet tall.

And Aspen groves (below) regularly spread over several acres, sometimes hundreds of acres, propagating new trees by shooting out new root connections in every direction, creating a living network-forest of trees.

So I have in my mind this city, built on a hill, made of a genetically modified living-breathing-self-sustaining giant tree colony that glows luminescent at night to light our pathways and highways, with roots that simultaneously clean our waterways and provide electricity, connecting each tree/home to the next. It's.. a darker, more angular, manmade steampunk version of Pandora. A little more Norman Foster and a little less My Little Pony, if you know what I mean. If I'm lucky one day I'll put my mind to it and put the designs down on paper and create something tangible.

Until then..