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NASA's Space Colony Designs From the '70s
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.
'If we don't do it right now, ... then we'll never do it, because we'll be overpopulated and the strain on the natural resources will be the number one priority.
O'Neill was right. The world population recently passed 7 billion people and its growth does not seem to be slowing down. As I see it, if we don't come to grips with this and learn to regulate our own numbers, mother nature will eventually do it for us, but then through war, famine and disease, in which case space colonies will be a lot less likely.
And it's not like space colonies can ever be an answer to overpopulation. Think about it: if we could manage to build an orbital habitat large enough to house a million people, a thousand of these would be needed for a billion people... after which there would still be billions of people left on the planet. In my view this strategy would only be feasible if 1.) we had hordes of robots and nanobots that could quickly build the colonies for us using only asteroids as raw material, and 2.) we had multiple space elevators to transport all those people up into orbit. None of that technology is available yet, while overpopulation is already a problem.
Finally, even if we did manage to build one or more successful, self-sustaining colonies in orbit, on the Moon or on Mars, overpopulation would probably still be an issue for them, so we might as well learn to deal with it now, here on Earth, before we start working on grandiose schemes to populate the rest of solar system.