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Space colonies of the future as imagined by NASA in the 1970s
- illys 5y agoWould the dream be complete without the O'Neill Cylinder Rama 3D animation? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zBIQCm54dfY&t=58s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zBIQCm54dfY&t=58s
- abdel_nasser 5y agodude thank you so much for posting this -- this video is so incredible and done in such good taste and i am so excited to have discovered the song it uses as well...
- aero-glide2 5y agoThere's an entire O'Neil cylinder in vrchat! https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=lSCTypdYnuE https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=lSCTypdYnuE
- illys 5y agoThanks, the cylinder world seems really neat, but the virtual reality video gives headaches :-( Do you know if there is any clean video of this world?
- aero-glide2 5y agoCouldn't find a video, but you can play vrchat without vr. Search for "Space Colony Island 4" in the world's section.
- illys 5y agoThank you :-)
- illys 5y agoYou are welcome, I am glad you like it. I find everything great too: the video, the cylinder idea, the music... It helps keeping big dreams for humankind in difficult times. Miserere, the music, is typical of the cathedral songs and is pretty old (centuries). Here is a good live version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H3v9unphfi0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H3v9unphfi0
- shadowgovt 5y agoThese pictures always make me smile for several reasons. One, they had a significant impact on the science fiction that came after them. We see recapitulation of this imagery in a lot of '70s-'90s anime (less often in live action, which I attribute to cost to film it). Two, I believe when we get anywhere near a technology level to try something like this, the result will look radically different. I'm reminded of the way that old depictions of the Earth from space rarely included the clouds, which are omnipresent and unavoidable when actually looking at the planet. Some things, a person just can't imagine until they're there.
- motohagiography 5y agoThe toroid colony image seems to make an appearance in the movie Interstellar as well. Given the risk of random super high speed/energy collisions with space objects, I would wonder if a more resilliant craft shape might be based on something nested and self-simlar, literally, "bigger on the inside," or like a disconnected formation that isn't physically connected. An orbital craft in a relatively stable solar system that used a planet as a lower energy "mooring ball" might allow for simpler geometric craft forms, but there's probably a maximally optimal shape for deep space starfaring vehicles. (oumuamua was very oblong and cylindrical, which might be a hint).
- Robotbeat 5y agoThe craft in Interstellar WAS a long cylinder, not toroidal. And I think it’s plenty resilient. The heaviest structure is on the outside, perhaps several meters thick. It’d take a pretty huge space rock, easily detectable with radar and almost on the order of something hazardous to the Earth, to puncture straight through 10 meters of rock shielding and steel structure.
- motohagiography 5y agoI stand corrected, I had interpreted that Cooper Station was a toroid and not a cylinder. Indexing on not getting hit at all seems more plausible than being resiliant to impact, unless our eventual interstellar travel involves some kind of space distortion that avoids collisions with anything below a certain mass/energy. Mental reference for effects of impact was something like this: https://bigthink.com/hard-science/heres-the-damage-a-tiny-speck-of-space-debris-can-do-at-15000mph/ https://bigthink.com/hard-science/heres-the-damage-a-tiny-sp...
- dsign 5y agoI have been doing a lot of flying over the deserts using flight simulators. There is so much space still on the planet! At the same time, we can't afford to use any more of it. Let's face it, we never were a benign species for the other ones[^1], not even when we were naked and mostly ate roots. But without space to live, grow, and try new things, our humanity is maimed. The path of least losing is leaving the planet alone, and making our own habitats. [^1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_extinction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_extinction
- edgyquant 5y agoPlus if we figure out rotating habitats and how to grow nature within them it’ll be a lot more comfortable to live in one of those than to live in the desert
- ncmncm 5y agoThey seem overwhelmingly more appealing than squatting on Mars. But so vulnerable to attack. Or neglect. It would be way easier and cheaper to build one unrolled out onto an actual desert. And safer. Maybe try that first?
- jazzyjackson 5y agoyou might be a fan of paulo soleri’s architecture, as illustrated in the book “city in the image of man” - he designs utopian megastructures (arcologies) that exist in spite of desolate conditions while still respecting our connection to nature: residences are at the edge of the city, so that the wilderness is always in view. You can stay in the guest rooms at Arcosanti, the city he started building in the 70s, it’s wonderful having a glass wall looking out to the barren desert, knowing i can walk 5 minutes up the path to a whole “city” of a cafe, theater, and workshops.
- edgyquant 5y agoDisclaimer: I am a self taught programmer, not a structural engineer or physicists. What you say is true but with a couple of caveats. 1. Yes it would likely be cheaper to build domed habitats in the desert. But how long will that be the case? In the desert you have to build on top of sand (or dig way down and build a crazy foundation that would likely cost close to a space habitat) and there may be local governments who aren’t keen on random immigrants coming and building giant domes in their territory. 2. Humans have lived on Earth for a hundred thousand years and have barely colonized the most extreme deserts (both frozen and unfrozen.) The reason thus far is because there isn’t a good economic reason to do so. We’re talking about colonizing the solar system, for resources or whatever, so the idea is that colonizing the desert isn’t sufficient. 3. Space is empty right now so we have to bring everything up from the surface. In a future where people have an economic need to colonize Mars it would make sense to have infrastructure in space that allows for mining/etc so that you don’t need to lift 100% of the resources off the planet. In which case, and with decent automation, it may become cheaper to build habitats in space than it is to build buildings on Earth. If it’s early and there is no infrastructure in space there likely isn’t an economic need and thus those who lived there would be doing so for their own pleasure and would pay a premium. To clarify: My argument isn’t that we should build these habitats or we should colonize anywhere at all. But if people are wanting to colonize Mars it would be cheaper and nicer just to build rotating habitats with Earth like gravity and whatever weather you choose. I know if worked on Mars I’d prefer to live in a sunny paradise orbiting it than live below the surface while only having 1/3 gravity.
- ncmncm 5y agoTo me the definitive SF treatment of these things is Alexis Gilliland's Rosinante series. The idea of mirror flaps swinging around as the cylinder rotated was ridiculed, and brilliantly replaced with the Mitsubishi Dragonscale Mirror Array, a cone of millions of individually-steered mirrors. Clever re-uses of that drove major plot points both as a weapon, a la Archimedean defense against ships, then as the light pump for a beam weapon, which then became remote power for vapor-phase asteroid ore refinement, and then for a capital ship, all background for solar-system-scale political intrigue.
- Kaibeezy 5y agoSeveneves features O'Neill habitats. Can't wait to see the movie version.
- hermitcrab 5y agoImages of O'Neil cylinders captivated me as a child, and they still do now. So familiar and yet so weird. Something similar is depicted in the film 'Elysium'. But it is a open torus, rather than a closed cylinder and they never explain how they keep the atmosphere in.
- jazzyjackson 5y ago> they never explain how they keep the atmosphere in. not familiar with the design, is there gravity? that’s why our atmosphere sticks around, right?
- adwn 5y agoThere's no gravity on Elysium's habitats, but there's a centrifugal force caused by the rotation of the torus. However, that wouldn't be nearly enough to keep the atmosphere in, because the walls are only a couple 10s of meters high. For comparison, Earth's atmosphere stretches out for several 10s of kilometers. And even if their atmosphere wasn't lost, the inhabitants would quickly suffocate and die due to low air pressure. On Earth, there's 10 tonnes of atmosphere pushing down on every square meter at sea level, compressing the air to 1 bar. Reduce that ~100 km column of air to ~100 m, and the pressure would be very much lower.
- rm999 5y agoThis doesn't seem right to me, why don't astronauts suffocate on the International Space Station? You can pressurize air in a spacecraft, I believe the ISS is kept at ~1 atm.
- numpad0 5y agoThe habitat in Elysium is quite bizarre. The entire donut is built Cabriolet style flying LEO and protagonists just lowers commandeered space helicopters through inner perimeter. It could be said the Chekhov's gun principle applied beautifully but quite bizarre.
- melling 5y agoThe life of Dr Gerard O’Neill is worth a read: http://ssi.org/the-life-of-gerard-k-oneill/ http://ssi.org/the-life-of-gerard-k-oneill/
- Kaibeezy 5y agoThe High Frontier: The Untold Story of Gerard K. O’Neill uncovers the legacy of Princeton physicist and space visionary, Dr. Gerard K. O’Neill, who wrote the 1977 book, The High Frontier: Human Colonies in Space. The book and O’Neill’s subsequent activism sparked a grassroots movement to build Earth-like habitats in space in order to solve Earth’s greatest crises; a vision that is still alive today. Through old stories of “Gerry” as many called him, and the social impact he made on the world, this documentary pays tribute to the unsung hero of today’s space race, while hoping to inspire all ages and walks of life to reignite our planet’s space venturing spirit. https://thehighfrontiermovie.com/ https://thehighfrontiermovie.com/
- actually_a_dog 5y agoI'm pretty sure I also originally saw these images in another 1977 book I checked out from the library as a kid, Colonies in Space: A Comprehensive and Factual Account of the Prospects for Human Colonization of Space, by T. A. Heppenheimer. Here's a link to a 2017 reprint edition: https://www.amazon.com/Colonies-Space-Comprehensive-Prospects-Colonization/dp/0811736741 https://www.amazon.com/Colonies-Space-Comprehensive-Prospect... Pricing on Amazon for new copies seems to be a little fucked, but there are several used copies available for reasonable prices.
- dekhn 5y agoyeah, I think that's where I remember it from (I distinctly recall the cover).
- Kaibeezy 5y agoPretty sure this is the mothership for all that. (huge PDF) NASA SP-413 Space Settlements: A Design Study Edited by Richard D. Johnson, NASA Ames Research Center, and Charles Holbrow, Colgate University NASA Scientific and Technical Information Office, 1977 http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2016/ph240/martelaro2/docs/nasa-sp-413.pdf http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2016/ph240/martelaro2/docs...
- bni 5y agoI love these pictures, and also the description of something similar in Neuromancer. Someone should do an open world game that took place in one of these.
- ciroduran 5y agoOnce I read the headline I thought of the fantastic books by Usborne (or Plesa in the Spanish speaking world), Future Cities[^1] and the Book of the Future [^2]. These illustrations are super inspirational. [^1] https://2warpstoneptune.com/2014/03/04/usborne-publishing-the-world-of-the-future-future-cities-1979/ https://2warpstoneptune.com/2014/03/04/usborne-publishing-th... [^2] https://www.murrayewing.co.uk/mewsings/2011/04/17/the-usborne-book-of-the-future/ https://www.murrayewing.co.uk/mewsings/2011/04/17/the-usborn...
- chadwittman 5y agoThis feels like it would be an amazing concept for a RTS or turn-based strategy game.
- db48x 5y agoCheck out Startopia.
- etxm 5y agoThose lakes are going to be a real bitch when belters hit these rings with an EMP.
- stickfigure 5y agoThe future isn't what it used to be.
- JKCalhoun 5y agoSo optimistic. I miss those days.
- ttGpN5Nde3pK 5y agoThis must be where the idea for Halo came from.
- Apocryphon 5y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ringworld https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ringworld
- ortusdux 5y agoI was thinking about these drawings yesterday when I saw the mockup of a ring made from 32 Starship fuselages. Welded end to end, 32 pieces would net a 1/4 mile diameter ring with a volume ~85x the ISS. Elon estimates that the refueling procedure necessary for interplanetary starship missions would require 8 fuel tanker starship launches, but this could be cut in half if the tankers were stripped of the elements needed for reentry and landing. I could see the economics working out to where it would make more sense to launch stripped down single use fuel tanker starships, and then sell the empty orbiting shells to someone interested in building in space. https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2021/11/17/science-upside-for-starship/#:~:text=32%20segment%20ring%20station%20composed%20of%20dockable%20modified%20Starship%20barrels https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2021/11/17/science-upside....
- rtkwe 5y agoThe exterior structure is a fraction of what you need for a working station though. It is a limiting factor on size because traditionally the module needs to fit in a faring but doing that doesn't save much cost because you still have to haul up all the other equipment.
- ortusdux 5y agoExactly. Many reusable starships flights would be needed to ferry up all the trappings of a working station, while returning reusable elements like the engines from the now mothballed fuel tanker ships. I just meant to point out that a stripped down starship would consist of 30+ tons of easily weldable steel pre-fabricated into a reinforced pressure vessel. Spacex's interplanetary goals would benefit from treating the tanker starships as expendable, and if someone was inclined to start building habitations similar to those depicted in the link, they could buy up the building-blocks for a song.
- idlewords 5y agoNothing is easily weldable in space, and empty hulls aren't habitrail elements that you can connect into something useful (unless a lot of design goes into it up front). Even if the hulls were free, the cost of creating such a space station would be prohibitive.
- KingOfCoders 5y agoAs a kid of the 70s I know all that stuff promised to me. All I got was confusing USB cabling and Zoom that has problems detecting my camera and sound.
- cblconfederate 5y agoSo boring. So, like the earth except a lot more expensive and trapped in a tube. Meanwhile, with a little bit of genetic engineering we could turn ourselves to self-propelled, solar-powered, AI-augmented interstellar rockets.
- lost-found 5y agoBoring is not the takeaway I got from this.
- jonplackett 5y agoJust looking at the designs - almost all have a rounded base - pretty sure that would cause a weird 'gravity' direction anywhere except the centre-line of the ring. (Sorry I've been readying The Expanse series too much and it's making me very pedantic about spin gravity)
- jayd16 5y agoYeah? How so? Weird in what way?
- tnorthcutt 5y agoIf the floor is curved, then the direction of gravity would not be perpendicular to the floor (except at the exact apex of the curve), so you'd have a weird sensation of standing on a slope all the time. Instead, you'd probably want either a non-curved structure, or a flat false floor inside of it that is perpendicular to the direction of gravity. That would probably work ok though, since it would give you an easy place to run e.g. cabling, air handling, fluids, etc.
- matthewdgreen 5y ago>so you'd have a weird sensation of standing on a slope all the time. I mean, lots of people live on slopes here on Earth. It's actually a pretty desirable terrain, as long as you're not farming it. You can see in many of the toroidal stations that the hillsides are terraced and treated like slopes.
- tnorthcutt 5y agoSure, but as you mentioned, they're usually terraced, and you wouldn't e.g. build a house on a slope without leveling the site first, so your floors are perpendicular to gravity.
- jayd16 5y agoWell sure, but that doesn't sound weird at all.
- codeulike 5y agoI remember seeing some of these actual pictures in the late 70s, early 80s, they were very striking and mindblowing to me as a child, the idea of huge pieces of structure with lush green parks and farmland in space. They are really memorable and probably shaped a lot of peoples imaginations about what might be possible one day.
- noneeeed 5y agoI had a kid's encyclopedia of science that had a section that featured these pictures, I must have spent hours staring at them, they were mesmerizing. It's feels strange to look back and think how much the world has changed since I was a child in the 1980s, and yet how little it changed in the ways I thought it would.
- ilamont 5y agoThese were regularly featured in Omni magazine, along with other fantastic science-fiction artistry.
- codeulike 5y agoNow that might well be where I saw them
- wefarrell 5y agoInstead of perpetual manned space missions I’d like to see an experimental off world self sustaining biosphere. Put it in orbit, on the moon, or Mars and try to keep it alive while maintaining or increasing biodiversity. Make it modular so that it can be expanded and over time gradually introduce more complex forms of life. There are many experiments of various types of organisms in space but I’m not aware of any that test and try to sustain entire ecosystems, something that’s essential for prolonged human life off of this planet.
- mLuby 5y agoLike Biosphere 2? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biosphere_2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biosphere_2 Improvements in space life support technology should have significant and positive applications on Earth as well.
- wefarrell 5y agoBiosphere 2 was too ambitious and they had humans so they needed to cheat. Also the gravity and background radiation levels are no different. We really need to do it outside of earth.
- idlewords 5y agoWe can't even do a self-sustaining biosphere here on earth (apart from the entire planet) yet. It's a hard problem!
- qayxc 5y agoThat's not true. You can easily make aself-contained biosphere yourself using just a glass bottle, some water, dirt, and a few select species of plants, algae, or insects/orthopods [0] You can even buy them [1]. [0] https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2267504/The-sealed-bottle-garden-thriving-40-years-fresh-air-water.html https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2267504/The-... [1] https://eco-sphere.com https://eco-sphere.com
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- RcouF1uZ4gsC 5y agoLooking at these images, I can't help but feel that any real space colony like this will be like Singapore on steroids. For all its issues, Earth is actually pretty resilient. To ability to destroy civilization is pretty much limited to very large nation states. Not so in a spinning space colony. A small group could easily destroy it. Thus, there will be ubiquitous surveillance and huge social and legal pressure towards "correct" behavior.
- dsign 5y agoThat's the plot of "Red Sky-Ceiling", where one person infiltrates a space-habitat with a lethal virus and everybody needs to go into self-isolation. Cool thing though, they could tint red their sky to signal bio-hazard. By the way, I've done the math, and a habitat like the one in that book would need to fuse 18 metric tons of Deuterium per day to produce "solar light" for an area equals to Virginia state's. Pumping heat out of that thing must be a similarly hairy challenge.
- mabbo 5y agoOne thing many of these designs don't bring up is long-term growth. Is the plan to build it once and that's it? Boring, and too prone to failure if the project runs into trouble at any point in time. What I'd prefer to see is a space construction that is continuous. Imagine a ring station, but one that is cellular in nature- lots of smaller modules that together form the huge station. This allows one to construct and add further modules over time, growing as needed. The beauty of this design principle is that we could start today. Design the first iteration of these modules, with the intent to fit them into SpaceX's Starship (or whatever heavy rockets come next). Launch 10 or 20 of them, connect them, and spin them up to 1/5th gravity, something not too hard to do. Add modules in the centre of the ring that are zero-G, where zero-G things can be done- but allowing those who live on station to live in mild gravity at least. All the while, you can dream big. You can plan for how this station goes from 10 or 20 small modules to thousands.
- idlewords 5y agoI find it interesting that so many people claim spinning stuff up to create artificial gravity in space is "not too hard to do" and yet it has never been attempted, for a series of pretty compelling reasons. Everything is hard in space!
- mabbo 5y agoYou're not wrong. But I feel that like most things, it's only hard because it hasn't been tried. Once we've done it a few times, it's routine. That's human nature. We've also done some experiments already. There was, I believe, a Mercury mission where they spun the ship up. If I recall, it didn't go super well. But hey, we've had 50+ years to think of how to do it bette!
- rytill 5y agoWhat are some of the first compelling reasons that come to mind?
- f6v 5y agoIt has to be really huge or spin really fast? Sorry, my physics knowledge evaporated.
- yboris 5y agoMy favorite exploration of the possible future technologies is from a 1990 book: Great Mambo Chicken and the Transhuman Condition by Ed Regis It includes a great section on space travel and space living. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Mambo_Chicken_and_the_Transhuman_Condition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Mambo_Chicken_and_the_Tr... https://www.amazon.com/Great-Mambo-Chicken-Transhuman-Condition/dp/0201567512 https://www.amazon.com/Great-Mambo-Chicken-Transhuman-Condit...
- abecedarius 5y agoAgreed it's an underrated book.
- fudged71 5y agoBesides Halo, are there any great videogames or VR experiences that allow you to explore toroidal space colonies like this?
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- whalesalad 5y agoIt was all the cocaine!
- kache_ 5y agoA utopia that was once common across America.
- micromacrofoot 5y agohighly dependent on who you're asking
- micromacrofoot 5y agoIconic and beautiful but there's no way there'd be that much green space. We can barely agree to prioritize green space on earth and it's outrageously easier here.
- kijin 5y agoPriorities might change when you need all that oxygen simply to survive.
- omnicognate 5y agoEasier to prioritise if everyone dies of asphyxiation without it, perhaps.
- micromacrofoot 5y agoYou'd think, but it seems we're currently hurtling an entire planet towards mass climate-related migration and food instability... Regardless, by the time we're creating massive space colonies we'll probably be manufacturing oxygen rather than maintaining massive forests.
- wnkrshm 5y agoOceanic photosynthesis is what you want to also look at to protect, more than half (est. 50-80%) of our oxygen comes from oceanic life like plankton, algae, bacteria. If the oceans go, we're screwed.
- WiggleGuy 5y agoI find it hilarious they expected to waste massive amounts of expensive real estate to rear cattle in space.
- calebpeterson 5y agoAs a child my local public library had a series of books with these and similar futuristic artwork. I loved those books! By chance does anyone know what they might have been?
- davidw 5y ago"Rick Guidice" seems to be a familiar name behind the artwork. I too read books with this kind of illustration as a kid growing up and it makes me very nostalgic.
- dredmorbius 5y agoGerard K. O'Neill, High Fronteir and T.A. Heppenheimer, Colonies in Space were two of the better-known ones. Both have distinctive covers. https://www.worldcat.org/title/high-frontier-human-colonies-in-space/oclc/1052819304 https://www.worldcat.org/title/high-frontier-human-colonies-... https://www.worldcat.org/title/colonies-in-space-a-comprehensive-and-factual-account-of-the-prospects-for-human-colonization-of-space/oclc/987797130 https://www.worldcat.org/title/colonies-in-space-a-comprehen...
- abecedarius 5y agoonline copy of the latter: https://space.nss.org/colonies-in-space-by-t-a-heppenheimer/ https://space.nss.org/colonies-in-space-by-t-a-heppenheimer/
- dredmorbius 5y agoO'Neill's book is at the Internet Archive / Open Library, available for check-out.
- pensatoio 5y agoIf you enjoy fantasizing about these feats of engineering, mega-structures and space travel, I'd recommend checking out the Bobiverse Series by Dennis Taylor! Super funny, and very relatable, if you're a creator or engineer.
- anthonyaykut 5y agoWow, I can see where Neill Blomkamp got his inspiration for Elysium :)
- Qem 5y agoLove the films by this guy. I still hope to see a District 10, and the shorts Rakka and Zygote made into full movies.
- ggerules 5y agoIn someway this reminds me of the wonderful 1940s and 1950s artwork by Chelsey K. Bonestell. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chesley_Bonestell https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chesley_Bonestell
- ChuckMcM 5y agoYeah, I felt pretty ripped off by NASA :-) As a kid I fully expected to be spending vacations on the Moon by 2010. If Starship meets about 65% of the vision SpaceX has for it I have some hope that I might be able to go into orbit before I die. All in all though, what NASA really needed to make this stuff real was what SpaceX is working to provide, sending tonnage into orbit at an economic price.
- randmeerkat 5y agoNASA didn’t rip you off, Congress killing NASA’s funding did.
- davidw 5y agoBig nostalgia. I was born in the mid 70ies, and remember having books my parents got me with these sorts of techno-utopian illustrations. It all seemed so cool, and maybe we were headed that way.
- matchagaucho 5y agoStewart Cowley defined 1970s space illustrations. No other Artist inspired me more. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stewart_Cowley https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stewart_Cowley
- wdb 5y agoLove the drawings.
- dekhn 5y agoI really loved these when I was a kid and it was a major reason I was so enamoured with human space travel. Nowadays I look at this and think "who'd have the cash to build and operate that?"
- Robotbeat 5y agoThe answer is literally Jeff Bezos. And the idea is to lower the cost of all the various technologies required and then operate and build them cheaply using extraterrestrial materials without any more continued reliance on Earth’s resources. NASA was supporting this idea of asteroid mining (for in-space use) at one point with the Asteroid Redirect Mission (ARRM) which was canceled and replaced with Artemis.
- dekhn 5y agoI've done various estimates on what it would take to generate a truly self-sustaining (no earth dependence) non-terrestrial (space-based or planet based) society and I don't think it's practical unless you're willing to spend the equivalent of $10 trillion dollars or more over 100+ years.
- Robotbeat 5y agoIs launch costs one of the main variables? If so, I have a modest suggestion.
- jimbob45 5y agohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S_N3EYMgya4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S_N3EYMgya4 Looking at what the past thought space exploration would become is really fun. Disney and Wernher Von Braun collaborated to make a happily imaginative view into space exploration back in 1955.
- mattkevan 5y agoOne of my favourite books as a kid wa ‘The Usbourne Book of the Future’, which outlined the next 5000 years of human development and featured a lot of these illustrations. I’m still bitterly disappointed that the timeline it proposed was not accurate. Check out the amazing cassette futurism illustrations: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=usborne+book+of+the+future&t=iphone&iax=images&ia=images https://duckduckgo.com/?q=usborne+book+of+the+future&t=iphon...
- noneeeed 5y agoUsbourne really did make some terrific books. Some of them really defined my childhood, from their book about Ghosts that was in our primary school library and gave me nightmares, to the BASIC programming book that was foundational in me becoming a programmer. They still seem to be making some of the best non-fiction kids books, my kids have some great ones.
- SeanFerree 5y agoThe 70's were just such a great decade!
- cletus 5y agoWhat a lot of concepts ignore is material requirements, which is super-important. A good example is Larry Niven's Ringworld. It's a cool idea in the early days when people were thinking about mass-to-living-area ratio but to produce Earth-like gravity at an Earth-like distance would require the thing to spin at (IIRC) ~1.5m km/h. The centrifugal force would tear that apart. Likewise, people mistakenly view a Dyson Sphere as a rigid shell around a star. That was never the concept. This misconception is so common it's led to the term Dyson Swarm, which was always the original intent: a "cloud" of orbitals around a star all moving independently. The likely future of space habitation is (IMHO) going to use the humble O'Neil Cylinder [1]. This is nothing more than a cylinder a few miles wide and maybe a couple of dozen long. Such a cylinder could potentially house millions. They're large enough such that spin gravity wouldn't be disorienting and small enough such that they don't require exotic materials (eg space elevators for Earth require exotic materials we haven't even theorized yet other than possibly graphene). So an O'Neil cylinder can be built of nothing more sophisticated than stainless steel. You have options of joining them to other cylinders. You can build a "ladder", which is a series of orbitals all in the same orbit but slightly displaced. You could even run cables for transportation between them. You could construct networks of these things. You put solar cells on the outside and a window at one end, possibly using refractive materials down the center to create more pleasing diffuse light and the whole thing is reasonably low tech and low maintenance. You could even build them by hollowing out asteroids and other space bodies. The mac daddy to the O'Neil Cylinder is the McKendree Cylinder [2]. Instead of being a few miles wide, it might be hundreds of miles wide and much longer. This is beyond the tensile strength of stainless steel but within the theorized limits of graphene. Such a cylinder could comfortably house billions of people. As much as it's cool to have things like the micro-gee environment of the ISS, I honestly wish we'd start building prototypes for spin gravity. This would greatly simplify living in such an environment for extended period of time. To give you an idea of how efficient thing is for living area, IIRC the estimate is about 1% of the mass of Mercury could consume essentially be a complete Dyson Swarm around the Sun and comfortably house a quintillion (10^15) people. Planets are nice and all but are horribly inefficient uses of mass to create living area and come with some serious negatives, not the least of which is the energy cost of entering and leaving such a gravity well. This is also why looking for the signature of such a Dyson Swarm as evidence of extraterrestrial spacefaring life makes way more sense than pretty much any other approach. Saying that we're less than 1000 years away from having this kind of space-industry is beyond conservative. 1000 years ago we were throwing spears at each other. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O%27Neill_cylinder https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O%27Neill_cylinder [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McKendree_cylinder https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McKendree_cylinder
- kristianp 5y agoThese drawings are in Gerard k o'Neill's book, "the High Frontier". I remember reading it in the 80s, my local library in Australia had a copy.
- reaperducer 5y agoThe future was so much better in the past.
- mongol 5y agoI recognise these illustrations, they were used for cover for an edition of a Swedish translation of Rendezvous with Rama by Arthur C Clarke. Probably borrowed by the publisher but I assumed they were made for the book.
- dr-detroit 5y agoDon't forget to support these rapacious eugenicists by wasting your hard earned cash on doge coin the silly meme lol facebook is fun.
- vhodges 5y agoIf you like the art, you might enjoy https://spacehabs.com/ https://spacehabs.com/ too.
- noneeeed 5y agoI recently listened to the audiobook of Arthur C Clarke's Rendezvous with Rama. It's full of great descriptions of a habitat akin to one of these, especially with the experience of getting from the entry-point at the axis to the outer wall. It might be the only book that's ever given me the feeling of agoraphobia with some of the descriptions. I'd love to see some kind of adaptation, but it's not sure if a TV screen could ever do justice to the scale.
- kgin 5y agoI was OBSESSED with the first image of the toroidal station as a kid. Haven’t seen it in so long and this instantly made me feel like I was 8 years old again.
- sopooneo 5y agoIn one of the pictures I believe I see a hang glider. I am breaking my brain trying to figure out the dynamics there. Maybe it's simpler than I'm imagining, but what happens as you fly "up-rotation" at speed?
- GravitasFailure 5y agoI've got the same question. My guess is that, unless there's something to keep the air stationary relative to the station, you're going to get what looks like a tailwind which gives you plenty of extra lift, but an outside observer will see a headwind pushing you with the station's rotation keeping you from going into a true free fall. I really want to hear from anyone that disagrees because there's got to be something I'm missing. Ultimately we probably just need to do some testing.
- asiachick 5y agoI get the sinking feeling that large earth orbit space stations will never happen because they are too fragile to space debris. It's like imagine any single person could destroy the entire freeway system of a 10 million person metropolis in a way that would take decades to recover from anytime they wanted. Maybe that's not how fragile it is but it's how it seems. I suppose if we ever perfect force fields we can "raise the shields"?
- jl2718 5y agoGiant ball of water / human aquarium. It will be ice on the outside like Europa, and a nuclear core heating the whole thing (also possibly like Europa). There’s no other practical way. This will be obvious once the majority of humans are permanently living beneath the surface of the ocean. Signed, former NASA guy, unpopular with the spacecraft engineering crowd P.S. Yes, I know; Simpsons did it.
- fallingfrog 5y agoThis actually feels more plausible to me than colonies on Mars, to be honest. The delta v to get materials from one place to another in zero g is much smaller, so travel between cylinders would be pretty cheap, and solar panels would be easy to make thin and cheap too. Mars on the other hand has all the disadvantages of being in a gravity well but without the breathable atmosphere of earth or mineral wealth of the asteroid belt. Worst of both worlds.
- mobb_solo 5y agoIs anyone familiar with Paulo Solari's work on asteroids and such..? He was one of Frank Lloydd Write's Fellows.