A Denver-based cryptocurrency entrepreneur needs to construct a 450ft-tall statue of the Greek Titan Prometheus on Alcatraz Island. The plan proposed by Ross Calvin, the founding father of the American Colossus Basis and chief government of the bitcoin-mining firm Parhelion, would dramatically change the skyline of San Francisco Bay.
In keeping with the inspiration’s web site, the proposed monument, The Nice Colossus of Prometheus on Alcatraz, could be taller than the 305ft-high Statue of Liberty in New York Harbour and function a “beacon of optimism”. The statue could be manufactured from a nickel-bronze alloy and price round $450m. Calvin hopes to current renderings and a proper proposal, together with plans for an accompanying “expertise museum”, to US president Donald Trump and his representatives by early subsequent yr.
Calvin says the inspiration for the monument got here throughout a 2018 go to to San Francisco, when he watched the sundown over the Bay and felt that the skyline was lacking a landmark akin to the Statue of Liberty. The venture additionally connects to an thought from Calvin’s childhood, as he instructed Robert Stark throughout an episode of his The Stark Fact podcast: he was “crusing previous Alcatraz within the Bay and I checked out it and I noticed, nicely gosh, what a loopy factor to have this sort of bummed out, insignificant factor on this island. And it’s an ideal place for a logo of triumph and sweetness.” The statue, in response to a put up on the American Colossus Basis’s Substack from final February, “can be constructed to raise up males’s spirits in triumph and heroism—that inventive ingenuity is heroic and selfhood is sacrosanct”.
A rendering of The Nice Colossus of Prometheus on Alcatraz in situ throughout the San Francisco Bay Courtesy the American Colossus Basis, through X
Calvin sees the Greek god Prometheus—who gave people expertise in opposition to the desire of his fellow Olympians and was consequently punished by Zeus to have his liver eaten day by day by an eagle—as an historic forebear of the American spirit. “Prometheus is sort of the patron saint of what it means to be American,” he instructed Bloomberg. “The West is the factor the place unique issues occur, and that’s a really uncommon mineral in human historical past, and we’ve got to protect the social constructions that make it potential.”
Alcatraz is a well-liked vacationer vacation spot, a part of the Golden Gate Nationwide Recreation Space and guarded as a nationwide park. To construct there, the island must be reclassified as a nationwide monument. This course of requires federal approval and is prone to face opposition from environmental teams, heritage organisations and the general public. President Trump has additionally claimed he wish to reopen Alcatraz as a jail, which might immediately battle with Calvin’s imaginative and prescient for the island.
At 450ft, the proposed Prometheus would rank among the many tallest statues on the planet, however nicely wanting the Statue of Unity in India, which tops out at 597ft. The construction on Alcatraz must be inbuilt compliance with the Bay Space’s stringent seismic constructing codes and be capable of face up to the Bay’s harsh marine climate, making its building technically complicated and expensive. Even when privately funded, the Prometheus venture would possible face years of environmental overview, authorized challenges and public debate earlier than building may start. The Nationwide Park Service has not commented on the venture and there’s no indication that the US Division of the Inside has obtained a proper proposal.
For now, The Nice Colossus of Prometheus exists solely as rhetoric and renderings—dozens of them, some seemingly generated by synthetic intelligence, posted throughout the inspiration’s social media pages, typically overlaid with phrases together with “Manifest Future” and “Man Additionally Rises”.
