Flights

THREE HUNDRED KILOMETRES

I dreamed that I was looking from above at cities splayed out across valleys and on mountain slopes. From that perspective it was very clear that those cities were the felled drunks of once-enormous trees, probably gigantic redwoods and ginkgoes. I wondered how high the trees must have been, since today their trunks contained whole towns. Excited, I tried to calculate their heights, using a simple ratio I remembered from school:

If A is the surface of the cross section of the tree, B its height, C the surface area of a town, and D the height of the town-tree I was trying to work out, then assuming the average tree had a cross-sectional area of around 1m² at its base and a height of 30m, then the town (or rather small settlement) would be 1ha (or 10,000 m²):

This was the answer I got in that dream. The tree would have been three hundred kilometres high. I fear this slumbering arithmetic can’t be taken too seriously.