The original note, as written at the time
Imagine the omni layer: a plane onto which all things exist; or a plane onto which we manage to build a civilisation in space.
Ongoing development
The omni layer: a plane onto which all things exist, or a plane onto which we manage to build a civilisation in space.
The two readings are the same idea at different scales, and the second is the one worth taking seriously.
To build anywhere other than a planet’s surface you need a plane — an artificial ground. Everything we know about building assumes one: a foundation, a horizontal datum, gravity pointing down, a place to put the water. Take away the ground and every discipline that follows from it has to be reinvented, from drainage to property law.
So the interesting question is not the structure. It is what a civilisation needs at minimum to exist on a plane it made itself. Air, obviously, and heat rejection, which is the one everybody forgets and which is the true limit on anything large in space. Water that closes its loop. A gravity decision — spin it or don’t, but choose, because the biology depends on it.
And then the social minimum: a boundary, because people need to know where they are; a rule about who may alter the plane, because the plane is everyone’s floor; and a way for the system to be maintained by the people living on it rather than by a supply chain from a planet.
The other reading — a plane onto which all things exist — is a metaphysics, and I do not think it is useful as a design brief. What is useful is the discipline of asking what a floor is.
A civilisation in space is a civilisation that has answered, precisely, what it stands on.