NASA's Space Colony Designs From the '70s 90
New submitter oag2 writes "Discover Magazine has a new slideshow of NASA's pie-in-the-sky (or, rather, toroid-in-the-sky) mock-ups of what space colonies would look like, complete with verdant mountains, flowing rivers, cocktail parties, and a guy on a floating bicycle. Though the designs are retro-futuristic, the artist who made them was prescient in other ways. From the accompanying article: "In the context of the 70s, when we had some sense of momentum from Apollo as far as expanding the human presence in space, it seemed like the kind of thing we could have just picked up and moved with," Davis says. "And it's still possible. It's just a matter of where we decide to spend our money." But Guidice remembers a more telling prophecy from O'Neill. "One of the most memorable things I ever heard him say was, 'If we don't do it right now,' meaning in the next 20 years, and that was 20 years ago, 'then we'll never do it, because we'll be overpopulated and the strain on the natural resources will be the number one priority. We will not have any sort of inclination to see this through."'"
The O'Neill referenced above is Gerard K. O'Neill, physicist and founder of the Space Studies Institute. He wrote a book in 1976 called The High Frontier which featured these mock-up paintings, and explained in great detail how the space habitats would function. It's a fascinating book, and well worth reading if the pictures pique your curiosity.
I'm not gonna do it. (Score:4, Interesting)
Look at the TFA that is. Too depressing.
It's just a matter of where we decide to spend our money." But Guidice remembers a more telling prophecy from O'Neill. "One of the most memorable things I ever heard him say was, 'If we don't do it right now,' meaning in the next 20 years, and that was 20 years ago, 'then we'll never do it, because we'll be overpopulated and the strain on the natural resources will be the number one priority. We will not have any sort of inclination to see this through.
Very sad. Very true.
Space Habitats Are Still Possible (Score:5, Interesting)
I had hoped to work on them while getting a PhD in the 1980s: http://www.pdfernhout.net/princeton-graduate-school-plans.html [pdfernhout.net]
Still trying to make them on-and-off:
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/ [kurtz-fernhout.com]
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/SSI_Fernhout2001_web.html [kurtz-fernhout.com]
http://oscomak.net/ [oscomak.net]
http://openvirgle.net/ [openvirgle.net]
The human imagination is the ultimate resource (as economist Julian Simon said). What really killed the 1970s vision was Senator Proxmire's Golden Fleece Award. It's taken a long time to recover from that nastiness politically, coupled with other mistakes like the Shuttle (compared to cheap rockets with a return capsule). Plus computers have absorbed most of the creative energy that was going into the space program in the Apollo era.
The world itself has plenty of material resources and energy. We'll even probably have both hot and cold fusion soon which will make it easy to recycle everything. The real reason to go into space is about diversity, challenge, curiosity, exploration, community, and just room for more creativity -- to use space resources in space.
I took an undergrad course with Gerry O'Neill. He called me a "dreamer" for wanting to make self-replicating space habitats. :-) I was inspired by James P. Hogans's sci-fi novel "The Two Faces Of Tomorrow" which has a space habitats with an automated factory.
http://www.baenebooks.com/chapters/0671878484/0671878484.htm [baenebooks.com]
I I later found out J.D. Bernal proposed them in the 1920s:
http://vserver1.cscs.lsa.umich.edu/~crshalizi/Bernal/world/ [umich.edu]
Gerry O'Neill anticipated there would be a slow capitalistic expansion into space, and built his plans around that. Sadly, US capitalism was not kind to any of his business plans (Geostar, LAWN) which he had hoped would fund more space ventures.
Meanwhile, the non-profit world of cooperation in cyberspace seems to be what is taking off, and what ultimately may get us space habitats (self-replicating or not). I tried a couple times over the past two decades to try to get his legacy non-profit SSI interested in supporting a free and open source effort towards developing space habitats. But I found the core there was still enamored of Gerry's old business plan of creating solar space satellites and using that to fund a slow expansion into space. That plan may have made sense in the 1970s, but it ignore today's reality that such satellites could be used as weapons, and the cost of solar power on Earth is falling exponentially, and local power storage is rapidly improving via batteries and fuel cells, etc.. Once we are in space for other reasons, maybe beamed power might make sense for either facories or to aircraft or laser launch systems.
Anyway, I'm still trying to keep some of the dream alive. Mostly, in my spare time, for decades I've been focused (too much) on making a triple-based social semantic desktop to organize all the needed information (while the world passed me by on that too, like with RDF and URLs and so on):
http://sourceforge.net/projects/pointrel/ [sourceforge.net]
It's been interesting, even if not too much obvious direct results to show for it.
Re:Overpopulated? (Score:3, Interesting)
I read a interesting comparison last week:
If the entire population of the earth stood shoulder to shoulder, they would about fit into Los Angeles. And If the entire population of Earth lived in a density like they live in New York, they would about fill up Wyoming.
But on the other hand the population level where "Overpopulation" kicks in is very dependent on technology. For example, when you have a few weeks of power outage and complete transportation breakdown in a sparsely populated country, people can still muddle through by eating stuff from the fields in the immediate vicinity, and drinking from streams. When you have a few weeks of power outage and complete transportation breakdown in Manhattan, that would probably kill most of the inhabitants that can't get out.
In that regard there might be a time "sometime in the distant future" where the level of technology needed to survive on earth is just a small step away from the level needed to build and live in those space colonies.
Space & Earth Habitats Are Complementary (Score:4, Interesting)
Good points, but my wife and I put more than six person-years on our own dime into making a free garden simulator so people could grow their own food on "Spaceship Earth" -- and it is also a step towards living in space because people in space need to eat too. There is an edited version of one of Rick Guidice's pictures as a backdrop in the add-on pack:
http://www.gardenwithinsight.com/ [gardenwithinsight.com]
So a lot of the ideas are complimentary. You're using the internet now to make your point and some of that technology indirectly came out of the space program which pushed technology along, including satellite communications. The picture of Earth seen from space has (arguably) done probably more than any one single thing to unite our planet (especially the image with a small Earth in a sea of darkness)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:The_Earth_seen_from_Apollo_17.jpg [wikipedia.org]
Thinking about things on a smaller scale like for a space habitat can focus the mind wonderfully on issues like recycling, meeting essential needs vs. expansive wants, being efficient in resource use, learning to get along with neighbors, sustaining human health without lots of expensive interventions, developing economic paradigms that are sustainable both socially and physically, and so on.
Anyway, one of the reasons for my not getting further directly on this is, beyond raising a next generation, actually investing significant my time on those topics you point to, for example education about health & nutrition and about transcending militarism & artificial scarcity:
http://www.changemakers.com/discussions/discussion-493#comment-38823 [changemakers.com]
http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html [pdfernhout.net]
http://artificialscarcity.com/ [artificialscarcity.com]
But as I say, making good places to live in space and on Earth is complementary from a certain perspective, so it is not like that was wasted time in that sense in progressing towards space habitats.
Anyway, there are very few material resources in short supply on Earth. Pretty much all such shortages are politically motivated or the product of competitive economic tragedies or unaccounted for externalities. At the current rates of falling prices for solar, the world will be running off of mostly solar energy in 20 years unless something even better (like hot or cold fusion) is cheaper. As it is, probably at least 95% of the work done on Earth in the industrialized world is either useless or harmful to the common good, so there is plenty of spare capacity; see:
http://www.whywork.org/rethinking/whywork/abolition.html [whywork.org]
As I wrote in 2008, (perhaps a bit wishfully as far as OSCOMAK itself, true):
http://oscomak.net/wiki/Main_Page [oscomak.net]
====
OSCOMAK supports playful learning communities of individuals and groups chaordically building free and open source knowledge, tools, and simulations which lay the groundwork for humanity's sustainable development on Spaceship Earth and eventual joyful, compassionate, and diverse expansion into space (including Mars, the Moon, the Asteroids, or elsewhere in the Universe).
You can read an essay on how to to find the financing to create a "Star Trek" like society here.
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/AchievingAStarTrekSociety.html [kurtz-fernhout.com]
A flow into foundations of $55 trillion is expected over the next 25 years: "Is Open Source the Answer To Giving?"
http://news.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/04/20/ [slashdot.org]