New York City Under 5 Alien Skies

The plethora of Earth doomsday movies this season shows us all kinds of landscapes of a far future post-Armageddon. Because the Manhattan skyline is so iconic, New York City is often the backdrop for these implausible imaginary futures.

Earlier flicks have submerged NYC ("Artificial Intelligence," 2001), turned it into an arid pile of trash ("Wall-E," 2008), flooded the city with lava ("Disaster Zone: Volcano in New York," 2006) or iced it over in instant glaciation ("The Day After Tomorrow," 2004, and 2012 "Ice Age," 2011)

With a similar artistic license, space artist Nickolay Lamm has teamed up with astrobiologist M. Browning Vogel to create a fanciful set of illustration of the New York City skyline against skies of the solar system’s planets. We won’t worry about the planet habitability that would have been a prerequisite for erecting the skyscrapers; rather we’ll take a Twilight Zone-ish parallel universe look at alternative spacescapes that would make us nostalgic for the blue skies of Earth