14 visions of the future: Life on Mars and a rural skyscraper

Clothing company Bestseller is planning a towering headquarters for the small Danish town of Brande.

The project was approved by the city council in March 2019 but start and end dates have not yet been determined. 

"It will be a landmark that places Brande on the map," says Bestseller's head of construction, Anders Krogh Vogdrup. 

Dubbed “Sky Tower,” this project designed for Uber's urban aviation transport system, is intended to facilitate at least 2,000 vehicle arrivals and departures per hour, with each vehicle accommodating up to five passengers.

In calm, sheltered waters near coastal megacities, Oceanix City could be an adaptable and sustainable solution for human life on the ocean. The city is a leafy enclave built on floating concrete platforms, each covering almost five acres and moored to the seafloor in shallow waters. The city can organically transform and adapt over time, evolving from a neighborhood of 300 residents to a city of 10,000.

This design concept is a finalist in NASA's ongoing competition to design 3D-printed habitats for Mars.

The competition required the teams to design habitats that could withstand the intense radiation, extreme temperature shifts and thin atmosphere on Mars. And the habitats had to be designed so that they could be built via 3D printing. 

A 3D printer could be sent to Mars to build a habitat before astronauts even touch down, meaning astronauts would have a place to live as soon as they arrived planet-side.

Deepspot, a nearly 150-feet deep pool, will be used to train divers of all abilities and includes an underwater tunnel for spectators.

It's scheduled to open in Poland in the fall of 2019.

Billed as "the highest outdoor deck in the entire Western Hemisphere," this balcony coming soon to the Hudson Yards in New York City includes a glass floor that lets you look straight down 1,100 feet at the neighborhood below. You can also lean out over the city thanks to a nine-foot wall of boldly-angled glass. 

Discouraged that modern societies were increasingly disconnected from the sources of their food, Precht, the designers of "The Farmhouse" encourage sky-high agriculture. The angled walls of the proposed building allow space for gardens that can by used by residents to grow their own food.

Studio Precht is in the mountains of Austria. 

For their smart city development in Toronto, the Alphabet company Sidewalk Labs is incorporating protective elements that will shelter people from the wind and rain, allowing them to spend more time outside. 

Lilium's designs for small, electric jets that can take off and land vertically would allow for air taxis in densely populated urban areas.

The Lilium jet is built on the principle of "ultra-redundancy," and each aircraft has 36 independent engines. 

"HAWK30," the unmanned aircraft being developed by HAPSMobile as a telecommunications platform, measures approximately 256 feet long.

Powered by solar panels on its wings that house 10 propellers, "HAWK30" can fly at an average speed of 70 miles per hour. Since it flies at high altitudes above the clouds, its solar panels are continually powered by sunlight.

The inner band of the proposed "Dutch Windwheel" in Rotterdam will contain a hotel and apartments, while the outer band will feature a high-tech Ferris Wheel-like attraction with 40 coaster cabins.

At a recent event in Washington, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos laid out his vision of having up to a trillion humans living in "manufactured worlds" to be built by future generations.

These miles-long "O'Neill colonies," named after physics professor Gerard K. O'Neill, would be placed above Earth and rotated to create artificial gravity.

Bezos envisions millions of such colonies housing trillions of people, sustained by continuous sunshine and the vast resources available on the moon, asteroids and other parts of the solar system.

The Week in Pictures: May 16 -23