the Royal Gardens, Descartes on drugs?

[nightcrawler13]

i'm doing my reading for my PPE degree and Descartes is comparing life with the mechanical basis on which the "Royal Gardens" were built...

"you may have observed in the grottos and fountains in the royal gardens that the mere force with which the water is driven as it emerges is sufficient to move various machines, and even make them play certain instruments or utter certain words depending on the various arrangements of pipes through which the water is conducted... visitors who enter the grottos of these fountains... unwittingly cause the movements which takes place before their eyes. For they cannot enter without standing on certain tiles which are so arranged that if, for example, they approach Diana who is bathing they will cause her to hide in the reeds, and if they move forward they will cause Neptune to advance and threaten them with his trident; or if they go in another direction they cause a seamonster to emerge and spew water on their faces; or other such things according to the whim of the engineers who made the fountain"

were there every really these automated mechanical water gardens?

if there were, why the hell don't they exist now!?

the National Trust would have no problem keeping funds up if they were like some medieval Disney World

[Purple Monkey]

I'm positive it's possible, like anything I suppose. Energy is energy at the end of the day, doesn't matter where it comes from. Nature contains an infinite cycle of energy and the possibilities of harnessing that energy to create perpetual energy supplies and limitless resources has been explored and theorised by the worlds brightest minds and even made solid in numerous projects a bit like the one you describe. It's just that humans like to ignore all of that free stuff and prefer to use up the finite resources we have instead, because you can profit from that and maintain the unjust inequality that is stopping us as a species from truly evolving. I find it's usually the dullest minds that often say "it'll never work".

Anything is possible, it's just unfortunate that the human race is in a downward spiral of self-destruction right now so all that awesome shit we read about in books or saw in movies like Back To The Future II is looking pretty unlikely. Unless there's money to be made in the short term for a minority of people then it will always end up on the shelf of good ideas wrongly labelled "bad ideas" by idiots and c**ts.

That's why. Er, I guess.