The WTC Twin Towers to be (re)built in the future?

Published here first in reply to a post on IMDB.
I don't really know what the motivation was for the construction of the current One World Trade Center instead of building the new Twin Towers with only the same exterior design as the original.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One World Trade Center#Current_building does suggest a few things in terms of politics. The Lower Manhattan Development Corporation (LMDC) and state governor Pataki picked what more-or-less became the current design. I don't know why. Larry Silverstein, who owns the site, also favoured a memorial.

The destruction of the original Twin Towers provided designers That major new real estate had to be built anyway to supplant the lost real estate, the designers thus got a chance to build a one much taller tower, with just the same amount of habitable floors and real estate as in one of the original towers.

I personally don't rule out the possibility, that the Twin Towers with the original exterior design would eventually return, but that they would return only after all the six or seven other major buildings and major minor buildings will have been built. The latter also have several dependencies.

This map gives a clue of the stuff that's going on. Here, the new buildings complement existing buildings to the west. Once complete, they all should more-or-less fully surround the old site.

The sortable table here offers the current construction status of all buildings involved on the site. Sort by date of completion, and you'll see how far along the project is going. So far, 3 Word Trade Center is under construction, and will be done in about 2018 or so. Construction of 2WTC is on hold because of a lack of tenants.

ID4. Aftermath.

Reply to thread post at "Independence Day: Resurgence" IMDb board. The post was interested about how reconstruction worked, and what could have been the changes in society.

My reply:

The POW thing is interesting, because I wouldn't be surprised, if a huge can of worms was not opened.

And also something to deal with how that alien society works. In 20 years, the surviving aliens must have had children, who never experienced living in space.

Omitted:

Sure, war stories must have been aplenty, but then how do you explain your children, that you lost a conflict? One option is, that they never told their offspring. But being all-telepathic, it's hard to imagine, that the kids wouldn't learn in time. Unless the surviving aliens completely isolated their children, or that the amount of offspring was too small to worry too much about what they would think.

OTOH, there's the nowadays' North Korea, where people truly believe, almost as a matter of religion, that they had an upper hand. Or that they're still the best thing ever. Dictatorships often rely on propagandistic belief systems that support such a rule.

The trailers suggest, that the first-wave aliens knew their stay was temporary, so I imagine the offspring might have been taught, that "oh, it's just temporary, we're leaving soon."

ID4/IDR: Economy during the interwar period

This is just a speculation, and mostly a reply to an IMDb thread post about Independence Day: Resurgence.

The first IDR trailer is out since December, but the film won't be out before Summer 2016.

The post started out, that the economy would tank, and the many U.S. carmakers would go bankrupt and would cease to exist.

I think the government(s) would have bailed out any and all carmakers, because they manufacture transport vehicles, which are crucial to rebuilding the infrastructure. Really important manufacturing locations are also kept away from large population centres.

For a short while, the model selection would be either less varied or less luxurious overall, and based on what parts are available at any time. Basically, a logistics's nightmare.

The production emphasis would have reoriented towards making parts for existing cars, and manufacturing transport and military vehicles. Cargo transport is actually more important, as it's responsible for supplies of, like, everything.

Because of petrol shortages, commuter transport in the U.S. would become very widespread. Trams, trolleybuses, trains, etc. would be more prevalent; provided there'd be enough electricity available. I haven't specifically mentioned petrol-based buses, because the military infrastructure would take those off city lines at any time for their own purposes.

Reverse-engineering alien tech can also help. It seems that they did a lot of that presumably under the U.S. aegis, as the world united.

After WWII, the Soviet war loot (aka contributions) from Germany — including a number of German scientists — allowed the Soviet Union to keep up technological parity to some extent until about mid-to-late 1970s, when self-imposed isolation (and some export restrictions) allowed the split between the West and the Soviet sphere to became more visible.

'Common-mold' products would be more widespread. People would certainly splurge less, and concentrate more on essentials, such as food, medicine, clothes and maintentance of creature comforts. Interestingly, lots of manufacturing would not have been moved to China.

Of important note is, that in 1996, many companies that were supposed to rely on redundant tech, had not made any, or had not finished deploying backup contingencies that were done during the onset of Y2K. If the ID4 situation had happened on 9/11 instead, the U.S. and many other countries would have been better-prepared to recover. (As it happened, many companies continued running on 9/11, because their tech infrastructure switched to using backup locations.)

Presumably, there would very likely be a holdout of people who would never use alien-based tech, and they would even try to maintain and improve native technologies. The Amish might probably be an example of that. So I wouldn't be surprised, if many of the common people would have chosen to only keep [consumer] tech from 1996 and somewhat before. Nowadays in the real world, there are people who make this a lifestyle choice to live like people once did in 1950s, 1960s, and 1980s even.

Locations that were not as affected by alien attacks, would be burdened with supplying food and medicine and everything else. There would be rationing until after production rates would have recovered to sufficient levels.

The state of refugees and internally displaced persons would be something akin to what Syrians and Iraqis are experiencing.

And then there's the question of what happened to some of the aliens that crashed. The trailer and the War of 1996 website suggest that some concentrated in Congo.

Update: The IDR website does get occasional updates, so the story along the timeline evolves.

As with any movie website, The War of 1996 site uses the latest technologies; so, compared to most other sites, it's obviously one of those that have actual system requirements with regard to hardware and sofware. More about that is detailed in a post in my technology-oriented blog.

Independence Day and the gays

This is in reply to a forum post on IMDb.

There was Capt. Jimmy Wilder (Harry Connick, Jr.), a fighter pilot and best buddy of Hiller (Will Smith). Wilder is used as this "fun sidekick", but is never directly said to be gay, despite sometimes unintentionally creating or getting into gay situations, including his on-screen mannerisms that suggested gayness. Because of the ambiguity around Wilder's sexuality, the gays can take it that Wilder was gay, and straight people can argue that he wasn't, and that he was just comic relief.

Yet the characterization of Wilder showed him as gay to the best of my mind, then two years into Don't Ask Don't Tell (at which time I didn't know anything about), so he was the non-offensive gay character to me, despite all the ambiguity.

The end result is that I remember that for a very long time this was the only big sci-fi blockbuster that featured gays in a positive light in the military, or anywhere at all in the movie space of the genre. Wilder was then killed, and Smith was outraged. And that was that.

In conclusion, the scene between Wilder and Hiller of the proposal that wasn't was one of the cutest in the movie.