The world is mostly water. We're mostly water. So maybe it makes sense that we neglected the skies.

It wasn’t always this way. For millennia, humanity's ambition pointed upward. Icarus, Babel, cathedral spires, the Wright Brothers, the Empire State Building racing the Chrysler to heaven. Then somewhere around 1970 America just... stopped looking up..

We let our cities flatten out instead of growing upward, so our skylines became frozen in amber. We abandoned the moon like a summer home we could no longer afford. Our planes haven't gotten faster in fifty years; we fly slower now than in 1959 when the Concorde launched. We regulate skyscrapers into squat boxes, surrounding our few remaining towers with endless two-story sprawl. Pitiful.

Meanwhile, the world kept climbing. Shanghai, Tokyo, Dubai, São Paulo — they’ve been building up because they understand what we've forgotten: density is destiny. Increases in city density correlate with higher wages. Tall buildings don't just house people and companies; they house the future.

And the skies never stopped evolving. They’ve just been switching between owners.

In the Russia-Ukraine war, 80% (!!!) of casualties come from above - drones that dominate the airspace. Israel paralyzed Iran not with merely ground forces but by owning the air above them.

While we mock Bezos and Musk's penis rockets, Starlink's 8,000 satellites now connect millions who once had no signal. The race to control the stars is back on, because whoever controls space holds the chips.

Companies like Boom promise supersonic travel's return. Zipline made African skies more advanced than American streets by delivering blood by drone faster than America delivers pizza. The future is hovering overhead in the skies.

Yet we're still fighting the wrong battles. People rage about AI's water usage, despite it being more efficient than other industries, while applauding urban sprawl.

There's even a parallel frontier emerging: the ocean floor. Companies like Ulysses are betting that undersea cables and deep-sea mining will matter more than Mars. They may be right.

Because what we build reflects what we believe. The Renaissance built upward, the modern world builds outward, but the anxious world is building inward, trapping us in atrophy.

The ancient builders understood something we've forgotten: civilizations that stop climbing start falling. Every culture that abandoned vertical ambition preceded its collapse with horizontal sprawl. Rome's aqueducts crumbled while its borders stretched. The Mayans abandoned their pyramids before abandoning their cities.

Despite the change its brought, technology has consistently delivered humanity from suffering: antibiotics from disease, electricity from darkness, flight from isolation. Because progress requires looking up, not down. The Dutch didn't build their country by building bunkers; they built dikes that reached toward the sky.

And today, I fear we’re raging not just against the machine, but against building itself. Against the towers, the rockets, the alluring ambition they represent. We'll ban the skyscrapers, ground the rockets, regulate the drones, and feel good about our morality play. Every new height is now met with suspicion.

Progress has always required reaching, sometimes foolishly, sometimes brilliantly. Yet if we keep mistaking reach for arrogance, we’ll rage against the skies and bury ourselves in the dirt.

Thanks for taking the Pack,

Zach

_{The vibe-killer disclaimer: The opinions in this post and all other posts only represent myself and do not represent the opinions of my employer or any groups I am a member of.
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