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Comment by shadowgovt | Hacker News Reader

These 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.

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Agreed on both points. I remember seeing some of these images back in the 70s when space colonies were first seriously proposed. The idea that I might live to see such things built was thrilling. But looking at these images now, they seem very naive. I suspect the reality of space colonies, should we ever build them, will be much less like an idyllic space suburb and more like a dense urban complex.

I think what space colonies end up looking like in reality depends entirely on the infrastructure we build.

If we’re stuck with rockets that either lift tiny payloads or are ludicrously expensive to launch (see SLS’ $2B-$4B estimated cost per launch), I think your predictions are right on the mark. In that situation building anything even remotely luxurious is not practical.

If we assume the existence of something like Starship+Superheavy as it’s currently planned, that starts to change. You’re still not going to see O’Neill cylinders, but simple ring stations with interiors nice enough to be resorts are within grasp.

To achieve things as fully as depicted in these images, extraction of resources and manufacturing in space will be necessary. Even with cheap superheavy launch, lifting all the required material to orbit isn’t a practical consideration. Achieving those prerequisites is helped quite a lot by Starship though, because it’s more than enough to bootstrap asteroid mining operations and the like.

The 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).

The 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.

I 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-sp...

Oh sure for actual interstellar travel. I was thinking interplanetary speeds (~10km/s) not interstellar travel speeds (~30,000km/s). In the film, they’re cheating by using a wormhole so never travel at those near relativistic speeds.

If we do build 'space colonies' I'm not sure that they'll be that different. The main reason behind these designs is to use centrifuge force to create artificial gravity. So until and unless we do invent some real Sci-Fi artificial gravity this remains our best approach and so are these spinning designs.

I think we'll actually see more of similar designs, even if much smaller, e.g. in spacecrafts for human journeys beyond the Moon and, indeed, space stations.

Interestingly, many very recent Sci-Fi movies involving realistic-ish human space travel feature spacecrafts with spinning toroidal living quarters.

> Interestingly, many very recent Sci-Fi movies involving realistic-ish human space travel feature spacecrafts with spinning toroidal living quarters.

Some less recent ones too [1]. It never ceases to impress me that this was filmed before the moon landings.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O4uOZnao7JM

> 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).

Don't forget Gene Wolfe's marvelous The Book of the Long Sun!

Great read! Short sun too!

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