Where Does Jeff Bezos Foresee Putting Space Colonists? Inside O'Neill Cylinders (geekwire.com)

Elon Musk of SpaceX wants to settle humans on Mars. Some talk about taking the Moon Village route. But Jeff Bezos has a different kind of off-Earth home in mind when he talks about having millions of people living and working in space. His long-range vision focuses on a decades-old concept for huge artificial habitats that are best known today as O'Neill cylinders. From a report on GeekWire (edited and condensed): The concept was laid out in 1976 in a classic book by physicist Gerard O'Neill, titled "The High Frontier." The idea is to create cylinder-shaped structures in outer space, and give them enough of a spin that residents on the inner surface of the cylinder could live their lives in Earth-style gravity. The habitat's interior would be illuminated either by reflected sunlight or sunlike artificial light. Bezos referred to his long-term goal of having millions of people living and working in space, as well as his enabling goal of creating the 'heavy lifting infrastructure' to make that happen. In Bezos' view, dramatically reducing the cost of access to space is a key step toward those goals. "Then we get to see Gerard O'Neill's ideas start to come to life, and many of the other ideas from science fiction," Bezos said. "The dreamers come first. It's always the science-fiction guys: They think of everything first, and then the builders come along and they make it happen. But it takes time." For Musk, the prime driver behind settling people on Mars is to provide a backup plan for humanity in the event of a planetwide catastrophe -- an asteroid strike, for example, or environmental ruin, or a species-killing pandemic. Bezos sees a different imperative at work: humanity's growing need for energy. "We need to go into space if we want to continue growing civilization," he explained. "If you take baseline energy usage on Earth and compound it at just 3 percent per year for less than 500 years, you have to cover the entire surface of the Earth in solar cells. That's just not going to happen. [...] I predict that in the next few hundred years, all heavy industry will move off planet. It will be just way more convenient to do it in space, where you have better access to resources, better access to 24/7 solar power," he said last weekend. "Solar power on Earth is not that great, because the planet shades us half the time. In space, you get solar power all the time. So there'll be a lot of advantages to doing heavy manufacturing there, and Earth will end up zoned residential and light industry. [...] We want to go to space to save the Earth. I don't like the 'Plan B' idea that we want to go to space so we have a backup planet. ... We have sent probes to every planet in this solar system, and believe me, this is the best planet. There is no doubt. This is the one that you want to protect."

Comments

Moving off-planet doesn't guarantee survival

[CRCulver]

the prime driver behind settling people on Mars is to provide a backup plan for humanity in the event of a planetwide catastrophe -- an asteroid strike, for example, or environmental ruin, or a species-killing pandemic.

As Kim Stanley Robinson proposed in his recent novel Aurora , the longterm survival of human biology might be inextricably dependent on Earth's ecosystem. Not just the sort of Earth-like features one can reproduce in an artificial habit for a few years, but the planet-wide scale that Earth offers. (In the novel, people on a generation starship discover that salt and other toxins start building up quickly in the smaller scale of their ship.) If humanity is going to survive, that looks like it can happen only if we transcend biology, and if the human race does start moving into machine bodies, then it might not be necessary to leave Earth after all — Vernor Vinge once mused that the reason we don't see other civilizations is because they moved themselves deep under planets' surface where even asteroid strikes wouldn't matter, and they now pass their time in virtual realities where life is easy and limitless instead of the hard work of interplanetary exploration.

The only resources

[Oswald McWeany]

The only resources within an O'Neill Cylinders are the ones that man puts there. They need to have a 100% recycling ability within the cylinder or they will need a place to dump waste and take in new resources.

Not saying that this is a deal-breaker, but it means everything needs to be more finely balanced. It's like keeping a fishtank. A small aquarium can quickly go belly-up if the chemistry isn't maintained. Large Aquariums are more stable. A pond or a lake, infinitely moreso.

Mars is an ocean. An O'Neill Cylinder is a fishbowl.

"This is the one you want to protect"

[NReitzel]

And that is -the- reason to build an O'Neill colony.

In order to build it and make it work, it is necessary to understand an ecology, deeply and comprehensively. Mistakes will be made and what better place to make a mistake than a totally artificial habitat? The first of the experiments (actual experiments, not "I read the journals" studies) was BioSphere, and that didn't work out so well.

So what was the motivation to fix BioSphere? Not much, really. Easier to walk away muttering "That was bad, dude."

With a colony, the colonials are most mighty motivated to fix the darn thing. If technology needs to be developed, it will be developed. If new principles need to be learned, they will be learned.

And for all of you "This is a nutty idea" I have a few short words. New World. Panama Canal. Washing Hands.

Nutty ideas have a way to become decidedly un-nutty.

Re:"This is the one you want to protect"

[waveclaw]

BioSphere II was a poorly planned theme-park garden now owned by the University of Arizona.

Want to see what can be done if you really understand ecology and not just theme park construction? Look at Ascension Island. Joseph Hooker, with the aid of Charles Darwin and Kew gardens, built the ecosystem on the island out of completely foreign species. This cloud rainforest was built whole cloth on a bare lump of clinker sticking out of the ocean long before electrification.

The key difference is ocean.

Biosphere II was designed with almost no significant bodies of water containing phytoplankton, which produce up to 85% of all the oxygen. The facility has a glorified wake pool that would have fit in a large cities' water park. The planners put in 50% more grassland than synthetic ocean. Much of that 850m "ocean" is dedicated to a coral reef. Unsurprisingly, the oxygen levels crashed soon after closing the doors. Both times.

If one thing was unrealistic about O'Neil Colonies it was the sheer lack of mixing oceans in all the designs. Water is one of the most abundant substances outside the dry line in the Solar system. It's also a good radiation shield and has high thermal mass. The giant magic space windows that somehow didn't let in vast amounts of cosmic radiation were more realistic.

O'Neil also wrote about Bernal Spheres. These are slightly better, but have their own engineering challenges. Artists still show the interiors as if they were a cutout of a heavily populated Italian riverside. More relaistic would be 70-80% ocean with islands or peninsula. But in Bezo's case it's probably a matter of go big or go home. And the Island Three plans are certainly Big Homes.

Energy budget

[A nonymous Coward]

I understand the allure of separating heavy industry from people and parks and nice things, to centralize the pollution. But if you put heavy industry in space and most people still live on the ground, it takes an incredible amount of energy to get the raw resources into orbit and bring the finish products back down. If you mine the moon or asteroids, that still takes a lot of energy to get to space-based factories. If you put the factories on the moon or near the asteroids, that's still a lot of energy to ship finished products back to earth or orbital habitats. If you put the factories on Earth near the resources, it's a lot of energy to get the finished products up to orbit.

Besides, factories pollute a lot less now than they used, they are getting cleaner all the time, and we rely on heavy industry, percentage-wise, a lot less than we used to, and all these trends are going to continue.

And if energy becomes so cheap (fusion, cold fusion, who knows) that all this shuffling is practical, then it would also be practical to simply pour all that energy into making heavy industry even cleaner. The problem with cutting pollution isn't the idea, it's doing so efficiently, and with cheap energy, efficiency becomes more relative.

So what am I missing? What is the actual benefit to separating heavy industry and people?