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Let us imagine ourselves among the millions of space colony
residents, returning to our home station after a long absence. Built
by a space factory with material coming essentially from the Moon or
from a nearby captured asteroid, this immense country was designed to
resemble our home planet, the Earth: green valleys, lakes and rivers,
trees, flowers and all sorts of plants appear as we look down from our
spacecraft's windows. Soon, housing structures appear. All kinds of
life form are hosted here: birds, animals and human beings. This
structure, our space city, where water, air and all wastes are
recycled, may seem like a big hollow wheel rotating around its central
axis to maintain an artificial gravity field. Does this image ring a
bell? How about the all-time favourite movie and a blockbuster book:
2001: Space Odyssey, by the famous science fiction writer,
Arthur C. Clarke.
In fact, space stations were far from being fictitious to a Princeton
University professor, Gerard K. O'Neill, who was the first to
design them in detail in the early 1970s. He considered such
extra-terrestrial cities to be an essential and unavoidable step in
the evolution of humanity. Based on sound scientific arguments,
O'Neill has been trying to prove that the best place for a
technologically advanced civilisation to develop is not a planet, but
a number of structures in space, in which the terrestrial environment
would be reproduced as far as possible, but which would not suffer
from energy restrictions, since they would be powered by the immense
solar energy reserves. Such stations would be built with material from the Moon and they
could help to bring under control some terrestrial problems like the
proliferation of nuclear power stations, the elimination of
radioactive waste, the shortage of fuels such as oil and natural gas,
and destructive climate changes. We could perhaps witness the realisation of these habitats in the
22nd century, not more than 100 years from now, if technological
advances continue at their current pace. These enormous wheels (each
called a Stanford Torus), about 8 kilometres in diameter,
carrying millions of people around their central axis, would be
accompanied by a large circular mirror floating in the space above
them, directing sunlight towards the central unit. A special
radiation field would protect the colonists, who are expected to enjoy
a much better life than we do now. Or will they? There is a good chance that because this technological advance
would not threaten the ecological equilibrium as previous industrial
revolutions have done, it might actually come into existence. But all
is not easy for such a project. For instance, we do not know if
gathering human factions according to religion or ethical/political
convictions (as might be desired) into individual cities is
necessarily a good thing for the development of humanity. However, the
development of such cities would allow different social and
cultural climates.
Life in the Universe |
Last updated August 13, 2001
Colonisation and Space Cities