Space colony art from the 1970s
publicdomainreview.org
publicdomainreview.org
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_Coloni...
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.
In any case, energy in space was not that big an issue. Unlimited supplies of it stream past earth's orbit pretty much all the time, you just need some concentrating mirrors or photovoltaic panels to put it to work.
The thing is that getting a foot hold is murderously expensive. And it remains merely prohibitively expensive unless and until you develop a cheap way to get mass into earth orbit.
Nobody plans on doing that. There are already trillions of tons of material _in_ space - it merely needs to be moved to where you want the habitat to be.
"You'll be able to lie about in the terraformed Martian soil/space station garden/ship farm and gaze at the stars!"
or
"We'll flay the skin from you and replace it with a polymer and wiring. In fact, we may just decide to crack open your skull and yank your brain, and shove it into a box, where electrodes will provide stimulus and try to present a mapping of sensory inputs you aren't evolved to process."
Honestly, I think the former is an easier sell. Also, the technology for the former is here--it just isn't distributed yet.
This singularity transhuman nonsense lacks both wonder and reason. It lacks reason because it depends on a lot of technology that hasn't been invented yet and presupposes that people will want to mutilate themselves on a whim.
Worse, it lacks wonder, because instead of attempting to change the world to suit us--perhaps the most fundamental of human drives--it instead seeks to alter what we are in attempts to make things "easier" and "more efficient".
Moreover, I'll take your breathing underwater example to point something else out, as well as the muscle/bone-density one.
We have that technology--some sort of Self-Contained Underwater Breathing Apparatus; a SCUBA, if you will. Similarly, we have ways of increasing muscle mass using steroids and other additives.
And you know what? This is largely the domain of the rich, or of those who have money and time to spend on frivolities. So much of the singularity tech that I see bandied about seems to fall very much in that camp (see also: http://archive.picturesforsadchildren.com/93/ ).
I'd much rather see better distribution and use of existing technology than wait for The Future--especially when it's presented as Everything's Possible With Science!
(Speculative fiction has done a decent job of picking apart some of threads of these sorts of futures...I'd suggest reading some of the Dangerous Visions anthology or more recently Paolo Bacigalupi if you'd like a properly melancholy commentary on the future with Science! There's this annoying problem of the many billions in poverty that somehow always gets waved away.)
The goal isn't deep space exploration, but orbital habitation structures.
And for those who haven't read that book, I highly recommend it!
P.D. Yes, it has sequels, written by a different author with a focus that seems the opposite than the one on the first book. Not recommended.
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)?
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.
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.
Fairly optimistic vision of the future, with overlaid disaster and chaos :)
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.
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 ?
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.
we've come much closer to blowing ourselves up then we ever
have to space colonies
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.
It would be an interesting vacation concept, if only it were about 15 orders of magnitude cheaper.
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.
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.
The book itself is online: http://www.nss.org/settlement/ColoniesInSpace/index.html
Including a list of color plates (with thumbnails): http://www.nss.org/settlement/ColoniesInSpace/colorplates.ht...
If so, I loved them too.
Some more fascinating images, though modern and computer rendered, so not quite of the same ilk.