In 1974 Princeton physicist Gerard K. O'Neill proposed building habitable cylinders in space that would spin to create artificial gravity, with mirrors channelling sunlight to mimic days and seasons. Designers working with NASA in the mid-1970s turned these ideas into detailed illustrations of endcap bridges, farming modules for each month and cutaway interiors. The cylinders were meant to hold most industry away from Earth's fragile biosphere, and the vision was sold as a near-term plan. Its appeal lay in a single idea: treating space as a place to live and build rather than an empty void to visit.

In 1909 D. W. Griffith made a 14-minute film about a speculator who corners the wheat market and doubles the price of bread. A farmer sows his field while a 'Wheat King' gambles in the Chicago wheat pit; bakers raise the loaf from five cents to ten and the poor line up for bread. Griffith cut back and forth between the farm, the feast and the breadline, a technique called parallel editing, so audiences saw both ends of the economy at once. The film drew on Frank Norris's stories and on a real scheme: months earlier Chicago financier James Patten had cornered wheat, sent bread prices up and made about $5 million, roughly $185 million today.