A City on Mercury Must Stay on the Dark Side

Terminator rolls around Mercury just like its sunwalkers, moving at the speed of the planet’s rotation, gliding over twenty gigantic elevated tracks, which together hold aloft and push west a town quite a bit bigger than Venice. The twenty tracks run around Mercury like a narrow wedding band, keeping near the forty-fifth latitude south, but with wide detours to south and north to avoid the worst of the planet’s long escarpments. The city moves at an average of five kilometers an hour. The...

 Contents of the Doomsday Chest

The contents of a Doomsday Chest will include stainless steel or titanium sheets, laser etched with an archive of the fundamentals of human knowledge. Each sheet would be carved, front and back, in the five most widely spoken languages of the 21st Century; Mandarin, Spanish, English, Arabic and Hindi. To aid in their translation, aRosetta Disc style object would also embedded in the Chest, providing easy visual translation between the "key" languages and over 2,600 other languages. The le...