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Space colony art from the 1970s
- sprash 14y agoLooks similar to the art of Klaus Bürgle from the 1960s: http://www.retro-futurismus.de/buergle_weltraum1.htm http://www.retro-futurismus.de/buergle_weltraum1.htm
- paulsutter 14y agoIt's interesting that we dont have visions of the future anymore. Peter Thiel is right, we now have a pessimistic, probabilistic opinion of the future, as opposed to the optimistic deterministic opinion we once had.
- CodeCube 14y agoHow could they rip off ideas from Halo so blatantly!! Kidding of course. I don't think I had consciously acknowledged this, but @paulsutter is totally right. I think the only vision of the future from recent times that I can think of is the "Minority Report UI" ... and we've pretty much already achieved that (NUI, iDevices, Kinect, etc.). Can anyone give any contemporary examples of what we imagine the future to be like (aside from a blade runner-esque dystopia)?
- seanyseanysean 14y agoI don't know but these renderings put me in mind of Freeside from Neuromancer.
- wlievens 14y agoAvatar had some pretty awesome user interface/interaction device concepts.
- lutze 14y agoDepends what you mean by contemporary? The Culture is very optimistic, and features engineering on a scale that makes these concepts look like iron age coracles. A personal favourite of mine is Schismatrix though. It's set almost entirely in space habitats similar to the ones featured here. As Neuromancer's lesser known cyberpunk contemporary, in places it's very... 80s in tone politically. But it's still a great setting, I'd highly recommend it.
- Retric 14y agoConsider Phlebas (1987) is 25 years old so I don't know if it still qualify's as recent.
- lutze 14y agoSchismatrix is 27 years... Honestly, that's still pretty new in sci-fi terms. The genre is older than most people think! Off the top of my head, I can't think of anything more recent that describes such structures as evocatively as those novels. They seem to have fallen out of fashion a little, which is a shame.
- dspeyer 14y agoRainbows End (Vinge) has a very interesting and not exactly dystopic vision.
- cli 14y agohttp://www.orionsarm.com/ http://www.orionsarm.com/ world building project. Neal Stephenson's "The Diamond Age" features technology that I would personally like to achieve some time in my life time.
- mogrim 14y agoPeter Hamilton's stuff is "classic" space opera, lots of nanotech, AIs, wormholes and what-have-you. Fairly optimistic vision of the future, with overlaid disaster and chaos :)
- wheels 14y agoSay what you will about the Singularity Institute and its ilk, but at the very least they're geared towards optimistic futurism. In fact, compared to space colonies, the notion of downloading someone's brain into a computer is far more sci-fi-ish. Space colonies would be a colossal engineering effort, but don't require any fundamentally new science.
- 31reasons 14y ago> Space colonies would be a colossal engineering effort, but don't require any fundamentally new science. I totally disagree. Science is science, fundamentally new science is not needed for massive engineering or artificial brain, they both require fundamentally new technologies. When you say "new science", it implies new methods of scientific inquiry or new way of looking at the world (for example Wolfram's New Kind of Science). Although it might use new facts about nature not discovered yet. Massive Scale does not mean just a magnification of dimensions. What will power these artificial "planets" ? What will shield it from space debris ? How will you reuse resources at a massive scale ?
- mogrim 14y agoDon't read much SF, then?
- toksaitov 14y agoAnd most of these concepts can be viewed in many series of the Mobile Suit Gundam franchise.
- jacques_chester 14y agoThese are from Gerard O'Neill's book, The High Frontier, which described how such colonies could be built and outlined their engineering parameters. I first read it as a boy and it's always stuck with me. Essentially, with the technology of the 70s he argued that it was plausible to build the "Island Three" design, a tube 8kms in diameter and about 32kms long. Each would be paired with a second such tube and both would rotate in opposite directions to create gravity. Such habitats could hold millions of people. McKendree[2] later speculated on what might be achievable with mature carbon-based nanotechnology, expanding the possible size to 460kms diameter and 4600kms long -- almost as much surface area than Russia -- and in any basic climate configuration desired. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_High_Frontier:_Human_Colonies_in_Space http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_High_Frontier:_Human_Coloni... [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McKendree_cylinder http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McKendree_cylinder
- maeon3 14y agoThe amount of energy needed to create this would be enormous. At the rate technology is shaping up, it would probably be money better spent to make it so that humans don't need those monsterous devices just so we can remain alive without an atmosphere and gravity. Instead, we work to evolve an plastic exoskeleton and imbedded "always on" technology inside us so humans can survive in outer space as easily as they survive on the surface of Earth. So you have to fuel up with oxygen and food, but then you are good to go and then you don't need to waste all that energy to move trillions of tons soil into space. The future is often very different than we expect, we may find out that we explore the universe in 2 foot by 2 foot by 6 foot pods inside of monsterous spaceships with arms, legs, sensors and technology. And we fly around the universe doing what humans always do. The human in the center of the ship, unconscious and living through and commanding the machine. Why carry along the body, just use the brain. Better yet, get 1000 brains per ship. Machines inside controlling the ship directed by the minds.
- podperson 14y agoSurely it will be one by four by nine foot pods.
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- mseepgood 14y agoIn today's science fiction all I see is battleships with dark / teal colored corridors and everyone wears a military suit and a gun.
- fauigerzigerk 14y agoNot always. There are shows like Lost, Heroes or Dark Angel as well. But you're right that these are exceptions.
- peachananr 14y agoReminded me of the Citadel from Mass Effect. It's beautiful!
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- uvdiv 14y agoI like the views, and I think the drawings understate them. You're on the inside of a curved surface: you can see hundreds of km in any direction, always from a high angle (no obstructions). And up to the full 4pi steradians of solid angle. Far more than a mountain view. Maybe more like an ISS view, but bigger still, and vastly sharper (with minimal assumptions about the atmosphere quality). The level of detail isn't really represented right. It would be an interesting vacation concept, if only it were about 15 orders of magnitude cheaper.
- stcredzero 14y agoThis particular set seems to be taken from the prints included in T.A. Heppenheimer's _Colonies in Space_, which my dad brought home to me as a kid. I'm going to grab it from my shelf now. (Also from the 70's) EDIT: I was wrong. Some of those pictures are there, but not all. Still, it was a great way for a kid to become interested in science.
- dredmorbius 14y agoThat's where I recall them from. The book itself is online: http://www.nss.org/settlement/ColoniesInSpace/index.html http://www.nss.org/settlement/ColoniesInSpace/index.html Including a list of color plates (with thumbnails): http://www.nss.org/settlement/ColoniesInSpace/colorplates.html http://www.nss.org/settlement/ColoniesInSpace/colorplates.ht...
- aswanson 14y agoI have a book from 1979 or thereabouts with the ringworld illustration in it from this site. Does anyone know about that series of books, "world of tommorow" or something like that that talked about terraforming Mars, future transportation and health, etc? I really loved that series as a kid but can't remember the name.
- invalidOrTaken 14y agoChildcraft, by chance? If so, I loved them too.
- aswanson 14y agoNot the one...but thank you. I plan on sharing childcraft with my kiddies.
- dave_sullivan 14y agoGoing from sputnik in 1957 to the moon landing in 1969, I can see how someone in the 70s might think we'd have space colonies by 2012. Then again, a lot of people thought we'd have blown ourselves up by now. Of those two visions, we've come much closer to blowing ourselves up then we ever have to space colonies. I'm ok with the lack of progress on the space colonization frontier--I just wish there was more progress on the "how to not blow ourselves up" problem.
- iwejfweoifjweif 14y agoReally? I don't think nuclear war is more likely these days than it was during the 60s and 70s. If anything I think that possibility has greatly decreased given the interdependence almost every nation has on other nations.
- angersock 14y agoI think you may have misread: we've come much closer to blowing ourselves up then we ever have to space colonies This isn't to say that (currently) we are at the edge of nuclear war, but rather that we've at some time between then and now been much better prepared for war than colonization. Considering the vast number of ICBMs and nuclear devices prepared by the US and USSR during that time period, compared to the number of colony ships and slowboats that made it into production, I think that's a fair point.
- iwejfweoifjweif 14y agoGood point, I did miss that.
- jvdh 14y agoThis reminds me a lot of some of the Culture things that Iain M Banks has described, also in his latest novel Surface Detail which also describes the open spaces with weightlessness. The ringed worlds were already described earlier in the series.
- iRobot 14y agoThis was my future. What went wrong?
- e03179 14y agoToday it's more about growing cyberspace than outer space.
- adastra 14y agoSpace enthusiast here. Gerard O'Neill proposed these "O'Neill cylinders" as an alternative way to go about colonizing space. This is in comparison to the monstrously expensive Mars missions being conceived at the time. There was a fascinating battle of ideas happening in the space community in the 1970's. Von Braun, Gerard O'Neill, and Carl Sagan all founded space advocacy organizations to pursue their various lines of thinking. Von Braun's National Space Institute ended up merging with O'Neill's L5 Society in the 1980's to form today's National Space Society. Carl Sagan's The Planetary Society still exists and is run by Bill Nye. Yes, the Science Guy. Von Braun came from the government, Apollo-style mission to Mars viewpoint, for obvious reasons. Sagan was more an advocate of using robotic spacecraft instead of humans, to maximize the scientific discoveries per dollar. (Although Sagan eventually came around to being supportive of human exploration and colonization.) O'Neill had an interesting viewpoint, which sowed the seeds for what is happening today. He believed that by first concentrating on space stations built at Lagrange points, that had some kind of economic benefit to Earth, then further space exploration could finance itself through private industry. Examples of economic benefit would be space-based solar power, or maybe asteroid mining, where you tow the asteroids to the Lagrange points and ship the minerals down to Earth. These drawings are of the ultimate goal -- entire space colonies, but you'd obviously start with something smaller that had a net economic positive and bootstrap up from there. The different factions of the space community went through a lot of turmoil and debate during the 80's and 90's, when it became clear that United States government was pursuing exactly none of these things. Instead NASA built the space shuttle, a technological dead end, and once the shuttle and space station contractors were entrenched people knew we would be stuck for a couple of decades. It wasn't until the early 2000's that a light appeared at the end of the tunnel: the private space industry, led by the likes of Elon Musk, Richard Branson, John Carmack, and Jeff Bezos. Sadly, the Columbia accident also happened, which lead to the shuttle's badly-needed retirement. But if you look at where they are today, the viewpoints of all these players have all essentially converged. They all support the private space industry. They support NASA doing robotic space science missions, and they have for the most part given up on NASA doing much that is useful in human spaceflight or colonization. There will at some point be disagreement over whether to first go to Mars, to the Moon, or to do space mining/space habitats. But right now I'd say most likely all three will be pursued in parallel, each funded by different billionaires. The competition, if there is one, will be won by actually getting such a mission off the ground and flying real hardware, and not by mustering political support. At least, that's the hope.
- bhauer 14y agoA few links out from that, I arrived here: http://www.spacehabs.com/ http://www.spacehabs.com/ Some more fascinating images, though modern and computer rendered, so not quite of the same ilk.