5 ms·
Ask HN: Whats the oldest drawing of an extraterrestrial colony?
I keep coming across John Wilkins' A Discourse Concerning a New Planet as (maybe) the oldest text seriously discussing extraterrestrial colonization, but it's a little hard to find a history of actual drawings / sketches etc of plans, serious or wacky / imaginative.
In any case thought someone on HN might be able to point me in the right direction. Any help is appreciated! :^)
Not looking for anything specific beyond age, could be space stations, lunar / martian colonies or anything in-between.
- pkdpic 5y agoThis is a start but only goes back to 1954 and is limited to a few russian pop culture images. https://www.rbth.com/history/332103-soviet-space-colonization-sci-fil https://www.rbth.com/history/332103-soviet-space-colonizatio...
- dredmorbius 5y agoI'd suggest looking to the history of science fiction, which ... goes back further than you might expect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_science_fiction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_science_fiction For a modern view based on a relistic sense of rocketry, science, and technology, I'd probably start with the early 20th century. There were several popular works written by the 1930s, and I'd expect some from earlier. Wikipedia's Space Colonization article suggests the work of Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, which I was also going to suggest, beginning around 1900. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_colonization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_colonization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Konstantin_Tsiolkovsky https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Konstantin_Tsiolkovsky I'm not aware of specific illustrations accompanying these, but any such would all but certainly follow those dates. The same article also suggests: In the 1920s John Desmond Bernal, Hermann Oberth, Guido von Pirquet and Herman Noordung further developed the idea. Wernher von Braun contributed his ideas in a 1952 Colliers article. In the 1950s and 1960s, Dandridge M. Cole[18] published his ideas. The Werner "who cares where they come donw") von Braun article was part of a series "Man Will Conquer Space Soon!' https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_Will_Conquer_Space_Soon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_Will_Conquer_Space_Soon! The series was reprinted in 2016: http://www.aiaahouston.org/newsletter/ http://www.aiaahouston.org/newsletter/ The age of American "pulp" science fiction magazines dates to 1926 with Hugo Gernsback's Amazing Stories. This and other early SciFi magazines are archived at the Internet Archive, and the covers are illustrated: https://archive.org/details/amazingstoriesmagazine https://archive.org/details/amazingstoriesmagazine
- pkdpic 5y agoHey thank you so much for the thoughtful response! Really looking forward to digging into these links :^)
- westcort 5y agoImages here: https://web.archive.org/web/20160304015426/https://settlement.arc.nasa.gov/70sArtHiRes/70sArt/art.html https://web.archive.org/web/20160304015426/https://settlemen... And here: https://space.nss.org/color-plates-from-colonies-in-space/ https://space.nss.org/color-plates-from-colonies-in-space/
- pkdpic 5y agoOh my gosh these are incredible, and commissioned by NASA no less. Ive run across one or two of these Don Davis renderings randomly, its so nice to finally know the artist and the original context!
- dredmorbius 5y agoThose images pretty much all trace to the work of Gerard K. O'Neill, a physist who began looking at the question of space colonisation in the late 1960s / early 1970s, notably at Princeton University, where he'd asked the question of where best to attempt space colonisation, notably contrasting planetary (or lunar) surfaces with orbiting space platforms. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerard_K._O'Neill https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerard_K._O'Neill The background is discussed in T.A. Heppenheimer's 1977 book Colonies in Space, chapter 2: https://space.nss.org/colonies-in-space-chapter-2-our-life-in-space/ https://space.nss.org/colonies-in-space-chapter-2-our-life-i... O'Neill himself published The High Frontier in 1976. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_High_Frontier:_Human_Colonies_in_Space https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_High_Frontier:_Human_Colon... https://archive.org/details/highfrontierhuma0000onei https://archive.org/details/highfrontierhuma0000onei (for borrowing, not download) LibGen: http://libgen.rs/book/index.php?md5=3CA0A35BFC63B8F53169890549DB7D89 http://libgen.rs/book/index.php?md5=3CA0A35BFC63B8F531698905... Both books include many of these specific images. Much of that work was also taken up under the L5 Society: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L5_Society https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L5_Society Though these were pretty widely distributed and publicised at the time, they were not the first realistic or scientific impressions of space colonisation. See for example Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) which, though science fiction, tended to apply much of the best current technical and scientific knowledge and ideas.