Category: Visualisation

A room with world map Mars 2.0, showing the planet as it may look after terraforming, as decoration on the wall, while Mars rover Sojourner is driving around between the furniture

23. October 2015

Mars 2.0 – Return to the Red, Green and Blue Planet

The terraforming of Mars is a fascinating subject. Is it possible to transform that lifeless desert planet into a living world with seas and jungles? Can some other colors, especially green and blue, be added to the Red Planet? In any case, now that we are dangerously warming our own planet, terraforming is no longer a theoretical concept. Mars Society Netherlands The Red Planet and I have a long history together. In 1999 I founded, together with Arno Wielders (currently involved in Mars One) the Dutch chapter of the Mars Society in a café in Leiden. In the first years… Read More

Impression of Dudok's Bijenkorf department store and windmill de Noord possibly reconstructed in Miniworld Rotterdam

Visualisation

15. October 2015

The Windmill Will be Reconstructed! But not on Oostplein

Well over a year ago I made a visualization of the reconstruction of the windmill on Oostplein in Rotterdam. A brief summary: the mill survived the bombing of 1940 but burned down in 1954; plans for rebuilding were voted down by the City Council because the windmill was standing in the way of progress. Since then, Oostplein has been the most desolate square of the country, or at least of Rotterdam. Reconstruction of the windmill would be a way to give the place some of its former allure again. Guerrilla marketing A guerrilla marketing campaign that I did together with Gyz… Read More

Group portrait of the eight planets of our solar system, shown to scale: Earth, Venus, Mars and Mercury in their entirety and parts of Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune and Uranus

Space art / Visualisation

28. September 2015

Portrait of the Planets

When you want to capture the whole Solar System in one image, you come across a problem. The distances between the eight planets and their star are huge, almost unimaginable. In all the pictures of the solar system you’ve ever seen the sizes of the planets are wrong: they are strongly exaggerated, by necessity. On a scale model of about two metres – a nice size to hang on the wall in your living room – the Earth would be only four thousandths of a millimeter. You wouldn’t even be able to see our homeworld! Heaven on Earth The only… Read More

Impression of The Sulawesi Space Elevator, with a rotating space station and solar panels in the foreground, the Earth in the background and the cable with elevator cars in between.

Space art / Visualisation

11. September 2015

The Space Elevator: It Ain’t Cheap, But…

An elevator into space: it sounds like science fiction. And that’s what it is: authors such as Arthur C. Clarke, Robert Heinlein and Kim Stanley Robinson wrote heavy books about it. But what’s science fiction today, is in the newspaper paper tomorrow and in the history books on the day after. And Arthur C. Clarke has been right more often; after all, he also conceived the communications satellite. An appealing concept In recent years, organizations such as NASA, but also companies like Google, started exploring the possibilities of the space elevator. And the concept certainly has some appeal. The traditional way to get… Read More

Axonometric drawing of the Moulin d'Orsennes, an old water mill in France which has been transformed into a center for courses and holidays related to yoga and arts

Visualisation

24. August 2015

Axonometrie du Moulin d’Orsennes

Just like last year I’ve spent a few weeks in Orsennes this summer, to do volunteer work at Sadhaka. A beautiful place in central France, where creative, yoga and massage courses are given in and around a beautifully converted watermill. Besides the work in the kitchen, plenty of time remained to experiment with crayons, pencil and watercolor. It may sound like professional deformation that as a subject I mainly looked at the architectural, urbanistic and landscaping context of the Moulin and the adjacent buildings. But it resulted in some nice drawings, as shown above. A computer-generated sketch Creative teacher Patricia Benjamins challenged me to make a kind… Read More

Impression of solar sail Johannes Kepler on its way to the moons of Jupiter against a background of stars with the Earth on the left and the moon in the distance

Space art / Visualisation

16. August 2015

Sailing on the Solar Wind

Probably not everyone realizes that there is also wind outside the Earth’s atmosphere. And that you can also sail in space. Sailing on a different kind of wind, that is: solar wind. The particles that make up sunlight exert force on the objects that are illuminated by them. Johannes Kepler was, in the 16th century, the first to realize the possibilities of a solar sail. He came to that insight while studying a comet. The tail of a comet is caused by the solar wind blowing its particles into space. Sustainable spaceflight The power of the solar wind is small… Read More

Wind farm in the North Sea seen from a low point of view against a spectacular evening sky with a sailing boat as a scale element

Visualisation

17. June 2015

One Thousand Windturbines on the North Sea

There are more and more windmills – wind turbines, I should say – in the North Sea. Good plan, because if it’s windy somewhere, it’s there. And they don’t bother anyone either, you might say. Yet the inveterate windmill haters get furious about wind turbines at sea. Others, like me, find it a pity that those wind farms are so far off the coast. Sustainable “We live on a planet close to its star, with a decent atmosphere, a liquid core and a large moon; if we don’t manage to generate our energy in a safe and sustainable way, we’re… Read More

Artist impression of St.Mary's church in Watford, looking from the west entrance towards the main church hall and the chancel area

Design / Visualisation

28. March 2015

The Refurbishment of St. Mary’s Church in Watford

St Mary’s Church is a beautiful eight hundred year old Anglican church building in Watford, England. The church is built with the characteristic flintstone that you see so often in this region. In early 2015, I spent two weeks in Watford to provide my services in the design of the remodeling of the church hall. Welcome The church is also very beautiful on the inside, but at the same time a bit impractical and not very flexible in use. For years there have been plans to make the church more open, more accessible, more “welcoming”. At the same time, there… Read More

NASA's indestructible Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity, still going strong after two hundred years, driving around on the terraformed former Red Planet

Space art / Visualisation

23. February 2015

Opportunity’s Bicentennial

More than eleven years ago, on January 25, 2004, Opportunity, NASA’s Mars Exploration Rover, landed in Meridiani Planum. An identical rover, Spirit, landed three weeks earlier, on the other side of Mars. Both vehicles were expected to remain active for 90 Martian days, more or less equal to three months on Earth. The Martian climate would claim its toll, or so the mission planners feared. Although on Mars the sun shines more than six hundred days a year, the dust storms and large daily temperature differences would surely leave their mark. Indestructible Oppy But the rovers appeared to be more… Read More

Orbital image of a terraformed Mars with the Northern ocean and the North Pole, Valles Marineris, Kasei Vallis, Arabia Terra and the Tharsis highlands, against a background of stars

Cartography / Space art / Visualisation

12. January 2015

Modified Mars Revisited

A few weeks ago I received an email from someone who asked my permission to use Modified Mars as a setting for a novel. Modified Mars is a project that I conceived eight years ago, and it’s about terraforming the world currently known as the Red Planet. Another Earth First a brief explanation for those who rarely or never read science fiction. Terraforming (literally earth formation) is the alteration of a planet in such a way that Earth organisms, including humans, can thrive there. Terraformers are especially interested in Mars for several reasons. The planet is not too big, not… Read More