14 ms·

The sci-fi cities of Bezos’s Blue Origin derive from his teacher Gerard O’Neill

105 points by tshannon 7y ago

PaulHoule 7y ago
Let's see... Getting resources from the moon seems out-of-date these days because the moon is far away in terms of energy even if it is close in distance. Getting resources from asteroids makes more sense. As for Reagan and Thatcher I don't see either one as oriented toward growth, but rather oriented towards a "war against inflation" that involved higher interest rates, austerity, and tolerance for a lower rate of GDP growth so long as the pain was felt by the middle and below. Reagan might have had sharper rhetoric against environmentalism, but the movement did not collapse until the Clinton years. When I've been envisioning space colonies lately it has been really large structures; I am fascinated by the idea that you can build a "small ringworld" where the rotation holds in the air with a scale size of a megameter or so, particularly if you can keep the upper atmosphere cold. The rotation speeds of such a thing are close to orbital velocity and the material requirements are similar to that of a space elevator... Unless you can construct an orbital-velocity bearing in which case you can build a belt around it to reinforce it. Even then it is hard to build room for any vertical relief into the budget, no high mountains, no deep oceans, probably you get a rather uncomfortable hydrological cycle. It would probably look different from one of those O'Neil colonies since you'd have a very blue sky and most of the things that look different from a planet would be far away and would look small. A lot depends on if the z-axis of the colony is long or short.
- PaulHoule 7y ago
  I don't know why I always get voted down pointing out the obvious on moon vs. asteroids... https://www.permanent.com/asteroids-vs-moon-private.html https://www.permanent.com/asteroids-vs-moon-private.html
- m4rtink 7y ago
  Still, moon has some gravity, making it possible to use some terestrial mining techniques and hardware and has more or less unlimited energy once you have a self-sustaining solar panel plant going. The general idea for ONeil cylinders has been to build them in Moon-Earth Lagrange points with lunar material launched by solar powered electromagnetic mass drivers. So the distance from Moon is not really an issue.
  - PaulHoule 7y ago
    The L4 and L5 Lagrange points that O'Neill advocated in the 1970s really make no sense. Halo orbits around Moon-Earth and Sun-Earth L1 and L2 make a lot more sense because they are energetically cheap to get to. L4 and L5 are a ghetto. Tech like the mass drivers can move material from the asteroid belts in more cheaply than it can from the lunar surface. You also have to consider what it costs to stop the projectiles when they get where they are going (one reason to use the Earth-Moon L1 because you can hit it with nearly no excess velocity)
- headcanon 7y ago
  > Getting resources from the moon seems out-of-date these days because the moon is far away in terms of energy even if it is close in distance. Getting resources from asteroids makes more sense. You're right about raw energy, but one advantage of the moon is that you can build electromagnetic mass drivers that can sling raw material into orbit without affecting the natural orbit of the body (technically you are but only negligibly). For asteroids, you probably have to haul the whole thing back into Earth orbit for it to be useful, and you'd probably have to use some kind of propellant. Also asteroid missions have much longer timelines if you have to go all the way out to the belt to get them. Less so if you get a near-earth rock, but those missions are pretty complex if trying it in Kerbal Space Program is any indication, and getting it wrong can be catastrophic. Many countries might not take too kindly to people wanting to sling city-destroying rocks around. Moon seems safer in that sense as a first option. The two aren't mutually exclusive of course, and there are advantages to both. I imagine we'll see both strategies employed in a variety of different ways.
- philwelch 7y ago
  Ringworlds and orbitals are significantly bigger and harder to build than O’Neill cylinders. O’Neill cylinders are potentially feasible within a century or two; ringworlds and orbitals would take much longer.
  - wongarsu 7y ago
    >O’Neill cylinders are potentially feasible within a century or two Is there anything fundamentally holding us back from building one right now? I mean there's the obvious problem that nobody has a good reason to build one, and only a hand full of entities have the funding to do so. But the engineering challenges seem to be on the level of building LHC or ITER: not nessesarily easy, but very doable.
    - philwelch 7y ago
      They're enormous, and enormous things are difficult and expensive to build. They're also in space, and building things in space is difficult and expensive. So that's quadratically difficult and expensive.
    - brianpgordon 7y ago
      SpaceX is claiming in the neighborhood of $1500/kg to put something into LEO. If you want to put a structure on the order of billions of kilograms into orbit it would make more sense to get that mass from something already out there and park it in high orbit instead - and space-based mining technology doesn't exist yet.
      - hinkley 7y ago
        I wonder if we could circularize the orbit of a near earth asteroid like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3908_Nyx https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3908_Nyx which is outside of earth orbit always (less likely to run into the earth, and 10% farther up the sun's gravity well.
      - wongarsu 7y ago
        At the same time a fully loaded Falcon 9 uses about $10/kg of fuel to put something into LEO. The cost mainly comes from building the rockets, and to a lesser degree operating them (mission control, landing ships, etc). All of those costs would come down dramatically once you reach the scales nessesary for building such a structure. Economies of scale could easily bring the price down an order of magnitude or more. For a small-ish cylinder that might be enough. For a cylinder that's multiple kilometers long we would want to do asteroid mining and rockets engineered to bring stuff up cheaply (at the expense of loosing a few rockets, loosing dirt is a lot more acceptable than loosing billion dollar satellites).
- stcredzero 7y ago
  Getting resources from the moon seems out-of-date these days because the moon is far away in terms of energy even if it is close in distance. Being close in time is still a factor for manned missions when starting out. If something goes very wrong, rescue is only a few days away.
  - cameronbrown 7y ago
    If space missions become common enough then we'll probably have some kind of navy designed to accommodate for this problem. Like a stellar breakdown service, always in the area
    - philwelch 7y ago
      Space is really big, though. If you're in the asteroid belt, it doesn't really help if the Space Coast Guard is also in the asteroid belt because they might still be multiple AU's away.
      - cameronbrown 7y ago
        That's true, but in all likelihood companies will cluster their operations together for this very reason. It's worth sharing some kind of common infrastructure in a specific location to protect workers/assets. Besides, a few days/weeks is a better response time than a few months.
        philwelch 7y ago
        Sure, but then you need at least two central points for the Space Coast Guard to operate from: Earth itself (inevitably) and whichever "cluster" in the asteroid belt you want. And there's really a limited size of an asteroid belt cluster you could get. If you start from Ceres and go a few hundred (even dozen!) meters either towards or away from the sun to reach another nearby asteroid, that asteroid has a completely different orbital velocity and will not line up with Ceres again until either it or Ceres completes another full revolution. That means you have to be in essentially the same orbit and travel either clockwise or counterclockwise, which is most efficiently done by making a more eccentric orbit (so your aphelion is the same as Ceres' but your perihelion is lower, or alternatively your perihelion is the same as Ceres' but your aphelion is higher) and then readjusting once you reach the target. But even this maneuver requires going the long way around the sun. Similarly if you want to go up or down relative to your orbital plane (i.e. change inclination). If you want a cluster of bodies in space that stays relatively the same distance from each other, you have to have a smallish orbital system. The Earth/Moon system is one of these, and it's going to be a lot more feasible to capture near-Earth asteroids and stash them in Earth orbit than to try and find a meaningful cluster of belt asteroids that actually stay close together over the long term.
blotter_paper 7y ago
Looking at these huge open spaces, I can't help but wonder what would happen after a single crack from oncoming debris. To avoid failing all at once a space habitat should be divided into a bunch of smaller sub-compartments -- like the Titanic!
- philwelch 7y ago
  I think we’re probably a century away from actually finishing an O’Neill Cylinder. Bezos was taking a strikingly long-term view—-he was discussing the transition from a Kardashev I to Kardashev II civilization. We haven’t even reached Kardashev I yet.
- gamegoblin 7y ago
  Something that is sometimes pointed out about holes in spacecraft is that you don't lose air as fast as movies would imply. After all, the pressure difference between inside and outside is only 1 atmosphere. For instance, if a micro-meteor created a bullet-sized hole in the International Space Station, it would take 5-10 minutes for the air pressure to drop to 0.5 atmospheres. The kilometers-scale space colonies described here would take much longer. More than enough time for some drone to patch it, or for the inhabitants to get to "life boats" or some sort of shelter. I think the important part, then, would be to design the shell such that damage in one part can't spread too far.
  - m4rtink 7y ago
    Exactly - these thing as designed by ONeil are HUGE - 30 km long on the "default" island three type. The solid walls would be meters thick, so the projectile would have to be very masive and/or very fast. And even then it would take a long time for pressure to reach dangerously low levels.
    - jandrese 7y ago
      I would expect lots of double and triple hulls. Especially on the glassy parts. Micrometorite smashes through a pane and it only opens up the compartmentalized space between the walls. It doesn't even depressurize anything because the secondary hull can be left unpressurized. These can then be repaired by technicians. A big emergency plug can be designed for large impacts, and as a last resort everybody can be trained in the use of emergency depressurization shelters. It's not without its risks, but at the same time it's not like the Earth is totally safe either. O'Neill colonies don't have to worry about natural disasters.
patagonia 7y ago
Just watch Prometheus. This is the same hubris and greed, even if well intentioned. As the other commentator said, they are too fragile to serve as humanity’s “back-up”. As theme parks or transit vessels, sure. But not as our back-up. Second, and in my humble opinion more importantly, these will tend to be built and owned by entities and thus everyone in them will be serfs. I honestly can’t say that a similar scenario wouldn’t play out for a planet, claimed as owned by the first flag planted. But, when the structure is wholly built and owned by a profit driven entity such as Amazon... Perhaps they can be owned by consortiums or non for profit entities, there is still issue #1. Finally. Why build one of these (gravity levels or for transit, I guess being the valid reason I can see, but maybe there is a planet-based solution for the gravity issue, idk) instead of utilizing the planets that are already right there for the using??? And instead of using all the resources to build a habitat, build something else. Edit: These are hotels, not homes.
- gamegoblin 7y ago
  Bezos addresses your final question in the presentation. The livable planetary surfaces other than earth (Moon, Mars, maybe Ganymede or something) aren't that big. In total they sum up to somewhere in the realm of Earth's land surface. So inhabiting them is "only" going to enable doubling the human capacity. Whereas space itself will increase human capacity by many orders of magnitude.
  - phkahler 7y ago
    Make underground tunnels on Mars. Excavation should be easier than building structures in space. Safer too.
    - jandrese 7y ago
      Why not make the underground habitats on Earth? If you're going to live underground in a fully self-contained ecosystem why bother traveling to a distant planet?
      - 7y ago
gumby 7y ago
Those NASA pictures from from a 1975 government document entitled "Space Settlements, a Design Study". I have a copy right here. It has been scanned ( https://settlement.arc.nasa.gov/75SummerStudy/s.s.doc.html https://settlement.arc.nasa.gov/75SummerStudy/s.s.doc.html ) but a quick click around didn't show any of the cool paintings.
- drchewbacca 7y ago
  There's some cool paintings here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_High_Frontier:_Human_Colonies_in_Space https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_High_Frontier:_Human_Colon...
  - T-A 7y ago
    Another good one: https://space.nss.org/settlement/nasa/70sArt/art.html https://space.nss.org/settlement/nasa/70sArt/art.html
sys_64738 7y ago
Given Amazon want to automate humans out of their logistics process here, why would they do anything with humans on the moon?
- wongarsu 7y ago
  The same reason oil rigs aren't fully automated: Humans are very versatile and agile.
audienceofone 7y ago
The whole presentation is made to emotionally engage an audience of one. One nostalgic non-reader who cares fuck-all about science but who probably remembers those 70's vintage color plates and is all about big ego-driven projects - i.e. Mr. Space Force. I don't believe for a second that Bezos thinks significant numbers of people living in floating habitats is happening any time soon if ever, but I do think he wants a bite at a contract to go to the moon, and everything about this media push down to the 2024 timeline (call me, mr president) is about pushing those buttons in one particular man's lizard brain.
- Tuna-Fish 7y ago
  Bezos has been pushing space colonies consistently since before he founded Amazon.
- dang 7y ago
  Could you please stop creating accounts for each few comments you post? That's against the site guidelines, and we ban accounts that do it. HN is a community, and it's important for community that users have an identity that others can relate to. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. I've written about this many times here: https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comment&storyText=false&prefix=false&page=0&query=by:dang%20community%20identity https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme... Also, this comment is much too much of a flamewar rant to be a good comment for HN. If you have a substantive point, please make it without stooping to that.
  - rezeroed 7y ago
    HN is not a community when drive-by down-voters are allowed. If they provided a comment with their down-vote that would be community.
philwelch 7y ago
The idea feels out of date because optimism about the future is out of date. More people are willing to believe that humanity should go extinct than believe that humanity should colonize space. The author’s foil for Gerard O’Neill is none other than Rachel Carson, whose advocacy against pesticides has directly led to countless human deaths from otherwise-preventable diseases like malaria. Instead of someone like O’Neill who tries to figure out how humanity can grow and flourish throughout the solar system, our hero is the savior of the mosquito.
- rexpop 7y ago
  > It's easier to imagine the end of the world then the end of Capitalism. — Frederic Jameson
- jerf 7y ago
  The funny/stupid/ironic thing is, the reasons people think humanity should just "go extinct" are all the reasons we should move to space instead. There's no story of "ecosystem damage" where there is no ecosystem in the first place. Though based on my experiences on HN, even some people here need this really bashed into their heads, that we can't hurt ecosystems that don't exist. ("What if some do?" Then by all means worry about them, but by resources, they are a fraction of a fraction of a percent of what the universe has.) There is a major unexamined assumption that people have that life exists everywhere, and therefore we can't put a toe outside our planet without stomping on something, simply because that's our Earth-based experience. Once brought to the conscious level it's obvious that it's false, but it's hard to get it up to that level for some people.
  - philwelch 7y ago
    Yeah, the great thing about an O'Neill Cylinder is that the sooner people can move there, the sooner they can leave the Earth well enough alone. (Although in reality, I think the real challenge is going to be responsible stewardship of the Earth, not just "leaving it alone". Even the Amazon rainforest is likely an artifact of human culture.)
    - 7y ago
stcredzero 7y ago
Issac Arthur has covered more modern near-future rotating habitat designs: (As well as much larger, further future designs.) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=86JAU3w9mB8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=86JAU3w9mB8 There are more recent designs which use solar panels and LEDs for lighting, which allows for the use of entirely stationary radiation shielding.
- DesiLurker 7y ago
  Big shoutout to SFIA for covering such 'out of the world' futuristic matters!
okintheory 7y ago
Anyone who spends more on escaping Earth than on saving it is saying f*ck you to most of our 7.7 bio. people.
- walrus01 7y ago
  Excepting the fact that technology developed for space (1957-present) has made huge improvements in ground based life. At its absolute peak the Apollo program consumed 4.4% of the US federal government budget. https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/infographics/infographic.view.php?id=11358 https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/infographics/infographic.view.php?i... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_spinoff_technologies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_spinoff_technologies
  - wongarsu 7y ago
    Even technologies that are not direct spinoffs often benefit greatly. For example the Apollo onboard computers created demand for smaller computers, accelerating development of integrated circuits and dropping their price. Some credit Apollo with singlehandedly dropping IC prices from $1000 to $20 [1]. If it wasn't for Apollo we likely wouldn't be on this forum. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invention_of_the_integrated_circuit#First_semiconductor_ICs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invention_of_the_integrated_ci...
- viklove 7y ago
  As a society, we can allocate resources to both of these problems in order to ensure the longevity of the human species. This kind of defeatist attitude is what's holding us back.
nobody271 7y ago
I thought the whole presentation was pretty cool. Those colonies are just visions of what might be built by future generations. He has new ideas about the future of industry and that's exciting. But I have a hard time seeing the scales he's talking about. Those colonies would not be able to hold billions of people. I'm not sure if moving industry off of Earth, especially for environmental reasons, makes a lot of sense. But when people imagine the future as being exactly like the present it's just tiring and stupid. I don't think he was acting like he knew all the answers but he's moving forward.
- philwelch 7y ago
  > But I have a hard time seeing the scales he's talking about. Those colonies would not be able to hold billions of people. It entirely depends on how many of them you build. You could also achieve much higher densities than Earth with no real loss of quality of life, since you wouldn't necessarily build massive oceans or deserts or mountains. (Though I would really love to live on an O'Neill cylinder that was laid out as an archipelago!)
  - DennisP 7y ago
    Also, if we get to a point where we can build them from carbon nanotubes, we could make them the size of continents. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McKendree_cylinder https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McKendree_cylinder
jerf 7y ago
How efficient of us to be already bored of something that can't exist any sooner than 50 years from now.
dfawcus 7y ago
It has been decades since I read the High Frontier, but as I recall on of the ideas was that the stations were initially there (in simplified form) to allow for Orbital Power Satellites to be deployed and serviced. It would be nice if we could deploy such, assuming we manage to avoid them being used as microwave weapons.
wbraun 7y ago
My first though is who would populate these cities. Secular society does not seem capable of reproducing at above replacement rate and global population is expected to peak and start declining this century. Would people start having more children again if housing was plentiful?
fallingfrog 7y ago
Here’s the thing: it is probably possible, given enough investment, to get a self sustaining civilization in space started. But it wouldn’t necessarily help the people still on earth very much. Take any island nation: Iceland for example. They have a small population so they can’t make everything they need; they import lumber, cars, food, etc. And they always have, right from day 1 that the island was settled. In space however the cost of constantly lifting goods from earth is too high to do that forever. So they have to be totally self sufficient. That means manufacturing, energy, extraction of minerals from asteroids, everything has to be in place. I’d say minimum 10 million population before they can assemble the diversity of industries to do that. Once they are at that point though, what are they going to trade with earth? Any minerals they obtain will be better used in space then parachuting them down to the surface for processing. So they wouldn’t need us at all. So it’s possible but politically very difficult to justify.
- fallingfrog 7y ago
  Oh, and I forgot the obvious danger: any people in space always have the “high ground” militarily since they can drop a rock on us whenever they want. So we’ll be in no position to make demands either.
rezeroed 7y ago
Bezos is in PR and sales pitch mode for his sight-seeing trips. Watching a launch involves listening to an endless marketing and sales pitch from that woman who speaks like she's going to hock a loogie.

105 points by tshannon 7y ago

Let's see... Getting resources from the moon seems out-of-date these days because the moon is far away in terms of energy even if it is close in distance. Getting resources from asteroids makes more sense. As for Reagan and Thatcher I don't see either one as oriented toward growth, but rather oriented towards a "war against inflation" that involved higher interest rates, austerity, and tolerance for a lower rate of GDP growth so long as the pain was felt by the middle and below. Reagan might have had sharper rhetoric against environmentalism, but the movement did not collapse until the Clinton years. When I've been envisioning space colonies lately it has been really large structures; I am fascinated by the idea that you can build a "small ringworld" where the rotation holds in the air with a scale size of a megameter or so, particularly if you can keep the upper atmosphere cold. The rotation speeds of such a thing are close to orbital velocity and the material requirements are similar to that of a space elevator... Unless you can construct an orbital-velocity bearing in which case you can build a belt around it to reinforce it. Even then it is hard to build room for any vertical relief into the budget, no high mountains, no deep oceans, probably you get a rather uncomfortable hydrological cycle. It would probably look different from one of those O'Neil colonies since you'd have a very blue sky and most of the things that look different from a planet would be far away and would look small. A lot depends on if the z-axis of the colony is long or short.

PaulHoule 7y ago
I don't know why I always get voted down pointing out the obvious on moon vs. asteroids... https://www.permanent.com/asteroids-vs-moon-private.html https://www.permanent.com/asteroids-vs-moon-private.html
m4rtink 7y ago
Still, moon has some gravity, making it possible to use some terestrial mining techniques and hardware and has more or less unlimited energy once you have a self-sustaining solar panel plant going. The general idea for ONeil cylinders has been to build them in Moon-Earth Lagrange points with lunar material launched by solar powered electromagnetic mass drivers. So the distance from Moon is not really an issue.
- PaulHoule 7y ago
  The L4 and L5 Lagrange points that O'Neill advocated in the 1970s really make no sense. Halo orbits around Moon-Earth and Sun-Earth L1 and L2 make a lot more sense because they are energetically cheap to get to. L4 and L5 are a ghetto. Tech like the mass drivers can move material from the asteroid belts in more cheaply than it can from the lunar surface. You also have to consider what it costs to stop the projectiles when they get where they are going (one reason to use the Earth-Moon L1 because you can hit it with nearly no excess velocity)
headcanon 7y ago
> Getting resources from the moon seems out-of-date these days because the moon is far away in terms of energy even if it is close in distance. Getting resources from asteroids makes more sense. You're right about raw energy, but one advantage of the moon is that you can build electromagnetic mass drivers that can sling raw material into orbit without affecting the natural orbit of the body (technically you are but only negligibly). For asteroids, you probably have to haul the whole thing back into Earth orbit for it to be useful, and you'd probably have to use some kind of propellant. Also asteroid missions have much longer timelines if you have to go all the way out to the belt to get them. Less so if you get a near-earth rock, but those missions are pretty complex if trying it in Kerbal Space Program is any indication, and getting it wrong can be catastrophic. Many countries might not take too kindly to people wanting to sling city-destroying rocks around. Moon seems safer in that sense as a first option. The two aren't mutually exclusive of course, and there are advantages to both. I imagine we'll see both strategies employed in a variety of different ways.
philwelch 7y ago
Ringworlds and orbitals are significantly bigger and harder to build than O’Neill cylinders. O’Neill cylinders are potentially feasible within a century or two; ringworlds and orbitals would take much longer.
- wongarsu 7y ago
  >O’Neill cylinders are potentially feasible within a century or two Is there anything fundamentally holding us back from building one right now? I mean there's the obvious problem that nobody has a good reason to build one, and only a hand full of entities have the funding to do so. But the engineering challenges seem to be on the level of building LHC or ITER: not nessesarily easy, but very doable.
  - philwelch 7y ago
    They're enormous, and enormous things are difficult and expensive to build. They're also in space, and building things in space is difficult and expensive. So that's quadratically difficult and expensive.
  - brianpgordon 7y ago
    SpaceX is claiming in the neighborhood of $1500/kg to put something into LEO. If you want to put a structure on the order of billions of kilograms into orbit it would make more sense to get that mass from something already out there and park it in high orbit instead - and space-based mining technology doesn't exist yet.
    - hinkley 7y ago
      I wonder if we could circularize the orbit of a near earth asteroid like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3908_Nyx https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3908_Nyx which is outside of earth orbit always (less likely to run into the earth, and 10% farther up the sun's gravity well.
    - wongarsu 7y ago
      At the same time a fully loaded Falcon 9 uses about $10/kg of fuel to put something into LEO. The cost mainly comes from building the rockets, and to a lesser degree operating them (mission control, landing ships, etc). All of those costs would come down dramatically once you reach the scales nessesary for building such a structure. Economies of scale could easily bring the price down an order of magnitude or more. For a small-ish cylinder that might be enough. For a cylinder that's multiple kilometers long we would want to do asteroid mining and rockets engineered to bring stuff up cheaply (at the expense of loosing a few rockets, loosing dirt is a lot more acceptable than loosing billion dollar satellites).
stcredzero 7y ago
Getting resources from the moon seems out-of-date these days because the moon is far away in terms of energy even if it is close in distance. Being close in time is still a factor for manned missions when starting out. If something goes very wrong, rescue is only a few days away.
- cameronbrown 7y ago
  If space missions become common enough then we'll probably have some kind of navy designed to accommodate for this problem. Like a stellar breakdown service, always in the area
  - philwelch 7y ago
    Space is really big, though. If you're in the asteroid belt, it doesn't really help if the Space Coast Guard is also in the asteroid belt because they might still be multiple AU's away.
    - cameronbrown 7y ago
      That's true, but in all likelihood companies will cluster their operations together for this very reason. It's worth sharing some kind of common infrastructure in a specific location to protect workers/assets. Besides, a few days/weeks is a better response time than a few months.
      - philwelch 7y ago
        Sure, but then you need at least two central points for the Space Coast Guard to operate from: Earth itself (inevitably) and whichever "cluster" in the asteroid belt you want. And there's really a limited size of an asteroid belt cluster you could get. If you start from Ceres and go a few hundred (even dozen!) meters either towards or away from the sun to reach another nearby asteroid, that asteroid has a completely different orbital velocity and will not line up with Ceres again until either it or Ceres completes another full revolution. That means you have to be in essentially the same orbit and travel either clockwise or counterclockwise, which is most efficiently done by making a more eccentric orbit (so your aphelion is the same as Ceres' but your perihelion is lower, or alternatively your perihelion is the same as Ceres' but your aphelion is higher) and then readjusting once you reach the target. But even this maneuver requires going the long way around the sun. Similarly if you want to go up or down relative to your orbital plane (i.e. change inclination). If you want a cluster of bodies in space that stays relatively the same distance from each other, you have to have a smallish orbital system. The Earth/Moon system is one of these, and it's going to be a lot more feasible to capture near-Earth asteroids and stash them in Earth orbit than to try and find a meaningful cluster of belt asteroids that actually stay close together over the long term.

blotter_paper 7y ago

Looking at these huge open spaces, I can't help but wonder what would happen after a single crack from oncoming debris. To avoid failing all at once a space habitat should be divided into a bunch of smaller sub-compartments -- like the Titanic!

philwelch 7y ago
I think we’re probably a century away from actually finishing an O’Neill Cylinder. Bezos was taking a strikingly long-term view—-he was discussing the transition from a Kardashev I to Kardashev II civilization. We haven’t even reached Kardashev I yet.
gamegoblin 7y ago
Something that is sometimes pointed out about holes in spacecraft is that you don't lose air as fast as movies would imply. After all, the pressure difference between inside and outside is only 1 atmosphere. For instance, if a micro-meteor created a bullet-sized hole in the International Space Station, it would take 5-10 minutes for the air pressure to drop to 0.5 atmospheres. The kilometers-scale space colonies described here would take much longer. More than enough time for some drone to patch it, or for the inhabitants to get to "life boats" or some sort of shelter. I think the important part, then, would be to design the shell such that damage in one part can't spread too far.
- m4rtink 7y ago
  Exactly - these thing as designed by ONeil are HUGE - 30 km long on the "default" island three type. The solid walls would be meters thick, so the projectile would have to be very masive and/or very fast. And even then it would take a long time for pressure to reach dangerously low levels.
  - jandrese 7y ago
    I would expect lots of double and triple hulls. Especially on the glassy parts. Micrometorite smashes through a pane and it only opens up the compartmentalized space between the walls. It doesn't even depressurize anything because the secondary hull can be left unpressurized. These can then be repaired by technicians. A big emergency plug can be designed for large impacts, and as a last resort everybody can be trained in the use of emergency depressurization shelters. It's not without its risks, but at the same time it's not like the Earth is totally safe either. O'Neill colonies don't have to worry about natural disasters.

patagonia 7y ago

Just watch Prometheus. This is the same hubris and greed, even if well intentioned. As the other commentator said, they are too fragile to serve as humanity’s “back-up”. As theme parks or transit vessels, sure. But not as our back-up. Second, and in my humble opinion more importantly, these will tend to be built and owned by entities and thus everyone in them will be serfs. I honestly can’t say that a similar scenario wouldn’t play out for a planet, claimed as owned by the first flag planted. But, when the structure is wholly built and owned by a profit driven entity such as Amazon... Perhaps they can be owned by consortiums or non for profit entities, there is still issue #1. Finally. Why build one of these (gravity levels or for transit, I guess being the valid reason I can see, but maybe there is a planet-based solution for the gravity issue, idk) instead of utilizing the planets that are already right there for the using??? And instead of using all the resources to build a habitat, build something else. Edit: These are hotels, not homes.

gamegoblin 7y ago
Bezos addresses your final question in the presentation. The livable planetary surfaces other than earth (Moon, Mars, maybe Ganymede or something) aren't that big. In total they sum up to somewhere in the realm of Earth's land surface. So inhabiting them is "only" going to enable doubling the human capacity. Whereas space itself will increase human capacity by many orders of magnitude.
- phkahler 7y ago
  Make underground tunnels on Mars. Excavation should be easier than building structures in space. Safer too.
  - jandrese 7y ago
    Why not make the underground habitats on Earth? If you're going to live underground in a fully self-contained ecosystem why bother traveling to a distant planet?
    - 7y ago

gumby 7y ago

Those NASA pictures from from a 1975 government document entitled "Space Settlements, a Design Study". I have a copy right here. It has been scanned ( https://settlement.arc.nasa.gov/75SummerStudy/s.s.doc.html https://settlement.arc.nasa.gov/75SummerStudy/s.s.doc.html ) but a quick click around didn't show any of the cool paintings.

drchewbacca 7y ago
There's some cool paintings here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_High_Frontier:_Human_Colonies_in_Space https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_High_Frontier:_Human_Colon...
- T-A 7y ago
  Another good one: https://space.nss.org/settlement/nasa/70sArt/art.html https://space.nss.org/settlement/nasa/70sArt/art.html

sys_64738 7y ago

Given Amazon want to automate humans out of their logistics process here, why would they do anything with humans on the moon?

wongarsu 7y ago
The same reason oil rigs aren't fully automated: Humans are very versatile and agile.

audienceofone 7y ago

The whole presentation is made to emotionally engage an audience of one. One nostalgic non-reader who cares fuck-all about science but who probably remembers those 70's vintage color plates and is all about big ego-driven projects - i.e. Mr. Space Force. I don't believe for a second that Bezos thinks significant numbers of people living in floating habitats is happening any time soon if ever, but I do think he wants a bite at a contract to go to the moon, and everything about this media push down to the 2024 timeline (call me, mr president) is about pushing those buttons in one particular man's lizard brain.

Tuna-Fish 7y ago
Bezos has been pushing space colonies consistently since before he founded Amazon.
dang 7y ago
Could you please stop creating accounts for each few comments you post? That's against the site guidelines, and we ban accounts that do it. HN is a community, and it's important for community that users have an identity that others can relate to. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. I've written about this many times here: https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comment&storyText=false&prefix=false&page=0&query=by:dang%20community%20identity https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme... Also, this comment is much too much of a flamewar rant to be a good comment for HN. If you have a substantive point, please make it without stooping to that.
- rezeroed 7y ago
  HN is not a community when drive-by down-voters are allowed. If they provided a comment with their down-vote that would be community.

philwelch 7y ago

The idea feels out of date because optimism about the future is out of date. More people are willing to believe that humanity should go extinct than believe that humanity should colonize space. The author’s foil for Gerard O’Neill is none other than Rachel Carson, whose advocacy against pesticides has directly led to countless human deaths from otherwise-preventable diseases like malaria. Instead of someone like O’Neill who tries to figure out how humanity can grow and flourish throughout the solar system, our hero is the savior of the mosquito.

rexpop 7y ago
> It's easier to imagine the end of the world then the end of Capitalism. — Frederic Jameson
jerf 7y ago
The funny/stupid/ironic thing is, the reasons people think humanity should just "go extinct" are all the reasons we should move to space instead. There's no story of "ecosystem damage" where there is no ecosystem in the first place. Though based on my experiences on HN, even some people here need this really bashed into their heads, that we can't hurt ecosystems that don't exist. ("What if some do?" Then by all means worry about them, but by resources, they are a fraction of a fraction of a percent of what the universe has.) There is a major unexamined assumption that people have that life exists everywhere, and therefore we can't put a toe outside our planet without stomping on something, simply because that's our Earth-based experience. Once brought to the conscious level it's obvious that it's false, but it's hard to get it up to that level for some people.
- philwelch 7y ago
  Yeah, the great thing about an O'Neill Cylinder is that the sooner people can move there, the sooner they can leave the Earth well enough alone. (Although in reality, I think the real challenge is going to be responsible stewardship of the Earth, not just "leaving it alone". Even the Amazon rainforest is likely an artifact of human culture.)
  - 7y ago

stcredzero 7y ago

Issac Arthur has covered more modern near-future rotating habitat designs: (As well as much larger, further future designs.) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=86JAU3w9mB8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=86JAU3w9mB8 There are more recent designs which use solar panels and LEDs for lighting, which allows for the use of entirely stationary radiation shielding.

DesiLurker 7y ago
Big shoutout to SFIA for covering such 'out of the world' futuristic matters!

okintheory 7y ago

Anyone who spends more on escaping Earth than on saving it is saying f*ck you to most of our 7.7 bio. people.

walrus01 7y ago
Excepting the fact that technology developed for space (1957-present) has made huge improvements in ground based life. At its absolute peak the Apollo program consumed 4.4% of the US federal government budget. https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/infographics/infographic.view.php?id=11358 https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/infographics/infographic.view.php?i... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_spinoff_technologies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_spinoff_technologies
- wongarsu 7y ago
  Even technologies that are not direct spinoffs often benefit greatly. For example the Apollo onboard computers created demand for smaller computers, accelerating development of integrated circuits and dropping their price. Some credit Apollo with singlehandedly dropping IC prices from $1000 to $20 [1]. If it wasn't for Apollo we likely wouldn't be on this forum. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invention_of_the_integrated_circuit#First_semiconductor_ICs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invention_of_the_integrated_ci...
viklove 7y ago
As a society, we can allocate resources to both of these problems in order to ensure the longevity of the human species. This kind of defeatist attitude is what's holding us back.

nobody271 7y ago

I thought the whole presentation was pretty cool. Those colonies are just visions of what might be built by future generations. He has new ideas about the future of industry and that's exciting. But I have a hard time seeing the scales he's talking about. Those colonies would not be able to hold billions of people. I'm not sure if moving industry off of Earth, especially for environmental reasons, makes a lot of sense. But when people imagine the future as being exactly like the present it's just tiring and stupid. I don't think he was acting like he knew all the answers but he's moving forward.

philwelch 7y ago
> But I have a hard time seeing the scales he's talking about. Those colonies would not be able to hold billions of people. It entirely depends on how many of them you build. You could also achieve much higher densities than Earth with no real loss of quality of life, since you wouldn't necessarily build massive oceans or deserts or mountains. (Though I would really love to live on an O'Neill cylinder that was laid out as an archipelago!)
- DennisP 7y ago
  Also, if we get to a point where we can build them from carbon nanotubes, we could make them the size of continents. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McKendree_cylinder https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McKendree_cylinder

jerf 7y ago

How efficient of us to be already bored of something that can't exist any sooner than 50 years from now.

dfawcus 7y ago

It has been decades since I read the High Frontier, but as I recall on of the ideas was that the stations were initially there (in simplified form) to allow for Orbital Power Satellites to be deployed and serviced. It would be nice if we could deploy such, assuming we manage to avoid them being used as microwave weapons.

wbraun 7y ago

My first though is who would populate these cities. Secular society does not seem capable of reproducing at above replacement rate and global population is expected to peak and start declining this century. Would people start having more children again if housing was plentiful?

fallingfrog 7y ago

Here’s the thing: it is probably possible, given enough investment, to get a self sustaining civilization in space started. But it wouldn’t necessarily help the people still on earth very much. Take any island nation: Iceland for example. They have a small population so they can’t make everything they need; they import lumber, cars, food, etc. And they always have, right from day 1 that the island was settled. In space however the cost of constantly lifting goods from earth is too high to do that forever. So they have to be totally self sufficient. That means manufacturing, energy, extraction of minerals from asteroids, everything has to be in place. I’d say minimum 10 million population before they can assemble the diversity of industries to do that. Once they are at that point though, what are they going to trade with earth? Any minerals they obtain will be better used in space then parachuting them down to the surface for processing. So they wouldn’t need us at all. So it’s possible but politically very difficult to justify.

fallingfrog 7y ago
Oh, and I forgot the obvious danger: any people in space always have the “high ground” militarily since they can drop a rock on us whenever they want. So we’ll be in no position to make demands either.

rezeroed 7y ago

Bezos is in PR and sales pitch mode for his sight-seeing trips. Watching a launch involves listening to an endless marketing and sales pitch from that woman who speaks like she's going to hock a loogie.