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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."
In the future you will be able to order an O'Neill cylinder from Amazon. Just don't get the cheap Chinese knock-off version.
Babylon Five! </voice>
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
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 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.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
The only I could see for reasonable air circulation was to put a core in the cylinder that then can be used to force rain/cooling actions.
That would probably help solve a bunch of other problems too, actually. If it was necessary to have more than one section in-rotation, so that counter-rotating forces allow the structure to otherwise maintain stationkeeping assuming that the center core sticks out the ends of the structure, that not-rotating core would be the place for the critical infrastructure to be housed. It would also allow for a transit-point between counter-rotating sections where the amount of risk for things like simple gasket failure would be small, and would let stores that don't need gravity or an approximation thereof to be stored such that less forces are imparted on the outer cylinders of the rotating sections. It would also serve as a good microgravity laboratory that's easily accessed from compartments that are better for the occupants, and if there's risk of radiation storms, the inhabitants could retreat to the core for the duration so that both outer and inner layers are protecting them.
Transiting from the rotating section to the core could be accomplished by use of basically a moving sidewalk and a ladder/clamp system. The moving sidewalk speeds the occupant to match the ladder on the stationary core, then one simply grabs on and now in microgravity, pulls one's self along, tying on to safety points as one goes. Alternately they could operate some kind of motorized car or lift, but that probably would only be necessary for moving larger goods.
That central core could also act as the point where "daylight" emits from, and as you point out, could be used to stir the air in the environment.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Actually, per wikipedia, the idea of a rotating cylindrical habitat was put forth in 1920 in "Beyond the Planet Earth", Konstantin Tsiolkovsky. (published in English in 1960)...
And maybe he's not the first either.
Besides, the O'Niell Cylinder is a very particular layout. The one in Rama was not an O'Neill cylinder AT ALL.
There was an ocean in Rama that was a ring around the center, and the habitat as i recall was the entire cylinder? (been years since I read it...) for example, while an ONeil cylinder in contrast has alternating lengthwise strips of habitat and windows (sky).
When I came here, it was all just empty vacuum and a swampy planet. Everyone said I was daft to build a space station orbiting a swampy planet, but I built it all the same, just to show them.
It fell from orbit, sank into the swamp.
So I built a second one. That one fell from orbit, sank into the swamp.
So I built a third. That exploded, fell from orbit, then sank into the swamp.
The fourth one, that one was ripped from time and space by the great machine on the planet below.
So I built a fifth one. That one stayed up. And that's what you're going to get, Ivanova, the strongest space station in all of Earthforce!
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
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.
Don't take life too seriously; it isn't permanent.
Why not call it Freeside and have it run by an AI. While at it, Amazon could join forces with Tesla, and call the joint venture T-A...
O'Neill Cylinders are unstable as I recall. They tend to eventually start rotating around their short axis instead, dumping everything on the curved walls out to the end caps.
Stanford Toruses are better.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
Actually, the idea of a so-called "O'Niell Cylinder" was put forward in 1973 by Arthur C. Clarke in a book titled Rendezvous with Rama.
It's true that Rama was, like an O'Neill Cylinder, a cylindrical habitat with rotational pseudogravity. However, Rama was made from unobtainium, while a true O'Neill Cylinder is instead made of unaffordium.
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?
Infuriate left and right
Coincidentally I just read Rendezvous with Rama for the first time last month. I don't remember anything about Rama itself disqualifying it from being an O'Neill Cylinder. If anything it was an O'Neill Cylinder that was tailored to fit the forces that longitudinal space travel would impart upon it, with the high wall on one side of the "ocean". If anything that the contents of the insides still obeyed Newtonian physics along with using that same physics to impart the centripetal acceleration for gravity was much better that so much modern technobabble used in science fiction. "Gravity" varied dramatically as one entered from the central shaft and made one's way down the the floor, the ability to fly within the atmosphere was there but it was risky, and various phenomena based on temperature were observed as the material was no a perfect insulator like so many science fiction stories like to assume.
Still trying to decide if I want to read the somewhat ghost-written sequels or not. I'd read Nolan and Johnson's Logan's Run, and then Nolan's subsequent sequels without Johnson, and the sequels just didn't live up to the original. I'm concerned that the other Rama books will be like that.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
No, there's a nonzero chance that when the sun expands past the orbit of Earth, the planet will still be there and will be consumed, and that this will occur before a sufficiently large asteroid hits Earth. And technically, even if the planet has moved to higher orbit and doesn't get consumed, there won't be any species to make extinct at that point, so the asteroid won't be species-ending.
There's also a nonzero chance that we'll manage to blow up the planet somehow, destroying all life before an asteroid hits.
In fact, I doubt the chances are anywhere near 100%. The gas giants, Earth, and Luna have done a fairly decent job of clearing our orbit of most of the larger objects that could hit us.
All of those problems would also exist on Mars. It doesn't have a thick enough atmosphere to protect them from ionizing radiation, and a leak would result in an instant loss of pressure. And the temperature on Mars can swing from -100 F to 70 F over the course of a day. If anything, living in space would be easier, because you'd have constant sun exposure on one side and none on the other. Mind you, if we manage to terraform Mars, that's another story, but as-is, it isn't a great match for human life.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
It's more fun to calculate 1%/annum exponential growth to a very modest (even in terms of human history) years. I'll do it for you.
1 year: 1.01
10 years: 1.10
100 years: 2.70
1000 years: 21,000
10,000 years: 1.64E+43
100,000 years: 1.4E+432
1,000,000 years: 2.4E+4321