How to Build a Space Colony | Visualizing The Future



Imagine a sprawling megastructure floating endlessly through space. One day, humans may occupy an orbital settlement several hundred kilometers from Earth. Perhaps, humans will settle closer to the moon, or in the main asteroid belt beyond Mars. If humans ever migrate into space, what would our settlement look like, and how would we navigate life in the final frontier?

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33 thoughts on “How to Build a Space Colony | Visualizing The Future”

  1. its sad that pretty much every major advancement now is locked behind space colonisation. which our current governments have no interest in ever doing since it won't benefit them or their party or even nation in a single lifetime.

    democracy is good so long as you don't need to expand…

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  2. ISS has nothing to do with it.
    It's an example of how not to do things.
    In the '70s, NASA put up a station volume in a day.

    The '70s NASA Ames/Stanford space settlement studies of the '70s established that no new inventions are needed to mine asteroids and moons and to build for virtually Earth-like conditions anywhere off-Earth where there are or to which we bring materials.
    The first Stanford Torus habitat would be done (with all the launch and in-space infrastructure to reproduce it) by ~2010, for cost like many other large infrastructure or industrial developments down here. Far less than a small oil war or bailouts. ~4x the cost of Apollo, spread over the ~30 years. (For reference, during Apollo, the US spent as much on cosmetics, and large States spent more on liquor, than we spent going to the Moon.)
    It is not a far future project for next century, or a huge budget-busting effort that we can in no way think of affording.

    Closed cycle ecological life support is not needed, though valuable to do R&D towards: if you can build a "Stanford Torus" or larger space habitat, you've got access to space infrastructure and flying mountains of materials to resupply from.

    There was misinformation about O'Neill habitats.

    He wrote that their ideas for the huge twin cylinder habitats were just extrapolations of what's possible, but with many issues and probably no more accurate than what "futurists" of the 1890s thought the year 2000 would be like.
    Things of that size are what they'd design 80 years after the Bernal sphere "Island One" or Stanford Torus are built.

    A colony on the Moon or Mars is impossible unless and until it's proven that we can live long-term and stay healthy in low G. That's *proof*, not S.F., not try it and wait and see, not maybe in the future biomechanically engineering ourselves and our offspring.
    Prove that first, and we can go on to talk about why O'Neill habs are the better or only option for large-scale long-term habitation off-Earth.

    A fully terraformed Mars, Venus, Titan, Europa, the Moon, etc would yield only additional X2 the land surface of the Earth.
    In just the inner Solar system small bodies, there are materials for space habitats for hundreds of tine the Earth's land surface (in better conditions than on any large planet, including much of the Earth.) in the main Belt, thousands of times, and the "habitable zone" around the Sun goes out into the Oort cloud.

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  3. You build a factory on your home planet then launch the rocket. Then you expand into a galactic empire. The factory MUST GROW

    (Bonus points if you get my game reference here)

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  4. Hate to be that guy, but I seriously doubt any of this is ever going to happen. Humanity can't even get organized enough to live sustainably on Planet Earth, there's zero chance we're going to be able to pull off permanent habitation in space.

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  5. The answer to building such structures is Androids. Being in outer space is really harsh on humans, and building something in outer space is on another lever. I believe that the only way that we, as humans, can achieve this sort of technology, is by having androids with AI that can work in space, using nearby resources, and we just wait till is done.

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  6. Imagine being so utterly bad at imagining anything to propose humanities worst locomotion and it's infrastructute on utopist space stations. Special kind of smart to imagine cars, stroads, traffic lights and dead pedestrians in the far future beyond earth. What a pity to have such a narrow mind

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