As our planet's population grew rapidly, the challenge of competition for living space and resources led some people to look beyond the Earth.
Imagine a p landscape of fertile fields and forests nudging up against the foothills of towering mountains. Rivers meander between prosperous towns dotted across ...
As our planet's population grew rapidly, the challenge of competition for living space and resources led some people to look beyond the Earth.
Imagine a p landscape of fertile fields and forests nudging up against the foothills of towering mountains. Rivers meander between prosperous towns dotted across the countryside. You can hear the sound of children playing in parks and gardens. Above them, in a clear blue sky, the Sun catches the wing tips of gliders circling in the thermals.
It sounds perfect, but something is not quite right. The scene is unnaturally idyllic, the sky slightly too blue and the horizon more curved than normal. That’s because this world is only 16 miles long, four miles wide and contained in a giant cylinder floating in space.
There are two big advantages of constructing a colony in space rather than on a planet,” explains Stone. “You have the Sun’s energy 24 hours a day, so you can concentrate that energy to melt materials or use it to generate power, and you can rotate the habitat to create whatever gravity you want.”
These solar-powered colonies would be positioned at Lagrange points, stable areas in space where gravitational forces effectively balance each other out. They therefore wouldn’t need their own propulsion systems. Travelling to them would take weeks, compared to the months required to get to space .
There is indeed a lot to think about and it’s easy to knock these sorts of big, visionary ideas. However, I’m not alone in believing that
if humanity is to survive we will one day have to leave the Earth
. A giant space habitat might be just the stepping-stone to the stars that we need.