Living in Space Colonies
Blue Origin and its plan for humankind
FUTURE PROOF – BLOG BY FUTURES PLATFORM
You can always dream big. But when you're a billionaire, you get to put plans into action immediately. That's what Jeff Bezos has been doing for almost 2 decades with Blue Origin. Recently, he unveiled his plans for the future of humankind, and they involve living space colonies, each 1-million plus strong.
LIVING IN SPACE COLONIES
On May 9, 2019, Jeff Bezos delivered a media presentation on a familiar topic: our future. In it, he explained why we need to leave for space and explore the solar system’s resources, what we need to do to get there, and where we might end up living.
Despite acknowledging that there are more pressing issues on Earth, such as poverty or pollution, he nevertheless suggested that it is possible to work on multiple problems at the same time. We can both on current problems and on long-problems. And, according to him, the fact that we will run out of resources here on Earth is “basic arithmetic.”
So, in his presentation, he showed what he and Blue Origin have in mind for us.
Also known as O’Neill cylinders, first proposed by Gerard K. O’Neill, who was an American physicist, these space settlements would be built using resources from the moon and nearby asteroids. In the presentation, Bezos gave a glimpse of how they would look.
Gigantic cylindrical colonies would use centrifugal force to simulate artificial gravity. Inside, there could be large cities or smaller towns (some even made to resemble those existing right here on Earth), fast-transportation systems, countryside areas, rivers, and so on.
They wouldn’t all look alike, nor serve the same purpose. Some could be for residential purposes, hosting a million or more people. Others could be vacation spots, such as enormous parks or beaches. Inside, the weather would be good all year round. Gravity could be adjusted, too. So if you want to experience 0 gravity and fly around, you can.
In this scenario, some people might still live on Earth. But, we would be able to preserve it and take care of it, by using resources from space. Living in these space colonies, you’d be able to go and visit Earth regularly – they would be close enough. If your relatives or friends lived in a different colony, you could go visit them quickly enough as well.
All of this sounds, at least at first, quite good.
According to Bezos, however, it is still a couple of generations away, at least (in fact, it seems like it might be even more than just a couple of generations away). Right now, there are 2 things that need to happen first. One, is to be able to make travelling to space cheap. Second, we must be able to extract his resources. The first comes with the ability to use reusable resources, something Blue Origin and SpaceX have been famously exploring. The second comes with the capability to mine moon’s resources.
As he said, our generation’s goal is to build the infrastructure – the road – to space.
Jeff Bezos is not the first one to announce plans to go to space. Others, too, have felt that it is an eventual necessity.
Elon Musk’s SpaceX, for example, wants to eventually enable people to live on other planets. He may not see O’Neill colonies as the way forward, but he does seem to agree with Bezos that the moon will be an important launchpad – whether it is for resource mining or colonizing Mars. He has even said that there is a pretty good chance that he will end up living in Mars some day.
Whether we will end up going to other planets or build gigantic structures that will function as space colonies, space enthusiasts have something to look for. And not just them – humankind too. We’re only at the beginning of what appears to be a space revolution.
In this day and age, having people talking about building the infrastructure needed to get us to space is nothing short of fascinating. We may have problems here at home too. And need to work hard at solving those as well. But keeping an eye out for the long-term, and making life better for future generations, is important too.
We all need to move out of home some day, after all.
Try Futures Platform for free today and explore a rich library of 900+ trend analyses across all industries, written and curated by a team of professional futurists
RELATED
