SpaceCollective Project - Designing Science Fiction Scenarios
The course will be loosely inspired by the movie (and the book) The Man who Fell to Earth in which David Bowie plays an extraterrestrial visitor to our planet. Instead of being an alien from outer space, our main character will be a second generation space colony inhabitant who is traveling to earth for the first time. This gives the students the chance to describe/visualize the circumstances in a completely futuristic environment and contrast them with life on planet earth, which in the future time frame of the story may have changed considerably due to environmental pressures. 
Background
In the 1970s space colonies were considered to be a viable alternative to a life restricted to planet Earth. The design of cylindrical space colonies, starting with Werner van Braun’s 1954 “Marsprojekt series” and taken to the next step 2 decades later by Gerard O’Neill, would go on to inspire several architectural phenomena here on Earth, from indoor shopping malls and domed football stadiums to Earthbound ecological experiments like Biosphere 2. All along Nasa was a firm believer that in the foreseeable future humanity would begin its expansion into space by launching floating islands into orbit between the Earth and the moon. The space agency’s motivation to finance the development of this initiative was their urgent concern that several global conditions—overpopulation, the greenhouse effect and the potential for a nuclear holocaust—would threaten the survival of Earth and humanity as a whole if we restricted ourselves to being a one-planet species.
