Found a few marvellous 1970s illustrations of space habitation
4 months ago by gnufuu to c/solarpunk
I remember that image from somewhere as a kid. Do you remember the name?
I don't remember the image having a name, but it's from Gerard Oneill's book The High Frontier, Human Colonies in Space. - see OP's link.
Looked like O'Neill's work. That's the same book O'Neill Cylinders are from
aaaand i just learned who i stole that joke from. i'm going to have to thank him.
The neat thing about them:
First, the pair of habitats can be rolled by operating the cylinders as momentum wheels. If one habitat's rotation is slightly off, the two cylinders will rotate about each other. Once the plane formed by the two axes of rotation is perpendicular in the roll axis to the orbit, then the pair of cylinders can be yawed to aim at the Sun by exerting a force between the two sunward bearings. Pushing the cylinders away from each other will cause both cylinders to gyroscopically precess, and the system will yaw in one direction, while pushing them towards each other will cause yaw in the other direction. The counter-rotating habitats have no net gyroscopic effect, and so this slight precession can continue throughout the habitat's orbit, keeping it aimed at the Sun. This is a novel application of control moment gyroscopes.
From Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O%27Neill_cylinder
Thanks!
Looks nice until you realize it is full of Flood.
Not that kind of Flood, Master Chief.
Even for earth this is way too suburban imo. Does not make sense to have everyone spread out that way for multiple reasons.
Solarpunk development in my view should be as green as our suburbs today but much denser to save on cost, keep people connected, and save room for wild nature.
It makes a lot of sense in the "Elysium" sense. A rich resort getaway.
It wouldnt be all blue and nice sky either, because no atmosphere. Unless they tinted the glass blue I guess but even then you would either have a permanent night or permanent full on solar hyper radiation. Like how would lighting that even work?
You'd clearly have a roof/floor all over, and it would all be artificial light.
Oh, and levels. You'd get way more use out of the space by making sublevels. But maybe they have that in the picture it's hard to say. Shit, all that dead space would be filled top to bottom of the torus, why leave all those precious cubics empty?
If would be DS9, not Rama.
Unless they tinted the glass blue I guess but even then you would either have a permanent night or permanent full on solar hyper radiation. Like how would lighting that even work?
Assuming the ring is orbiting the sun, you just tilt the ring a few degrees, depending on the width of the ring. At one point in it's rotation, the sun would be nearly directly below your feet and your part of the ring would be unlighted. At such times, the opposite side of the ring would be in sunlight shining from behind/beneath you. That part of the ring would likely appear as a glowing ribbon across the night sky and provide light like the full moon does on Earth. As the ring rotates you to the day side, the sun would appear to rise from over the edge of the ring wall and shine down on your part of the ring. At noon, the sun would be over head, just a few degrees to one side of the opposite side of the ring, which would likely be invisible in the glare.
Needless to say, the ring base and glass would need to block the most harmful rays of sunlight for that to work.
There'd be a few levels, I think, but depending on the size of the structure you wouldn't want too many as the 'gravity' would start to get noticeably different the further apart they go.
Agree, for sure. Still, the dream of chill accessible green space is real and should not be ignored. I think low-medium rise, high density with lots of interspersed green spaces is the optimal for cities. I think it can be done such that most land is much greener and more connected than modern suburbs.
Yeah I think we are largely advocating for the same thing. Central business districts that are all concrete and glass are pretty dystopian. But medium dense cities with car infrastructure replaced by green space would be perfect.
and save room for wild nature.
Arguably space habitat is the ultimate way to achieve that goal on earth :-)
Well, if you assume that the air recycling will be done by plants, you are going to have a need for a huge biosphere and probably for a lot of oceanic biome. If you plan on having an agriculture, if you plan on having pollinating insects, you are going to need a huge biomass.
You're going to have far more nature than you will have humans.
This setting usually assumes that you have a fast transport network built in the core infrastructure. So being spread out is less of a problem, especially if you have free electricity through solar panel. That means that moving stuff around on electric motor is going to be basically free.
Firing Terbinafine Lasers
I still think O'Neill was probably right, we could do this if we decided we needed or wanted to bad enough. There's issues to figure out, but that's just science. I got hooked on the idea of space colonization when as a kid in the 70s reading an article in a National Geographic issue exploring the idea, using a fictional opener of someone writing back home about living on one. They used some of Davis' works there.
I think the issue for space colonization is there's no real practical reason to do it beyond that it's cool and interesting. There's still absolutely tons of largely unused land in deserts, polar climates, and even the ocean that are far more accessible and habitable than space is.
Cool and interesting seems like two amazing reasons to do it.
I hate that we live under a mental paradigm that the only thing that matters is efficiency, ad infinitum and ad nauseam.
Shit, the nazis were super efficient, doesn't mean they had a good thing going.
Also, it could travel to find distant worlds to colonise
(It'd have to accelerate slooooowly though)
I hate that we live under a mental paradigm that the only thing that matters is efficiency, ad infinitum and ad nauseam.
Take one more step, and you've got it. Efficiency only matters because it maximizes PROFIT, and Profit is all that matters. We are Ferengi, at our core.
So the reason to do it is because uncontrolled, unregulated profit-gouging has made the Earth literally unliveable. We haven't reached that point yet, but we are certainly on that path, and those who would protect us from the inevitable outcome, won't even acknowledge that the problem exists, calling it a hoax, and even forcing their alternative hoax to be governmental dogma.
It seems like those who control the money have already decided that this is our future, so it's perfectly acceptable to destroy this environment, in order to create enough profit to build the next environment, which will be reserved for the Sociopathic Oligarchs.
Maybe... or would your body simply rot away faster since you aren't using it as much? I would be inclined to think the latter.
I suspect they'd need to do some power lifting to avoid accelerated osteoporosis in the lower gravity, as the bones do indeed require to be put under strain and shock to stay healthy.
100%.
The one thing global society lacks is direction. Shit even my dad told me that my whole life.
We're like, let's all compete about money and random great things will or might happen as a by-product.
Bitch we need to figure out what we want to do and do that, not just wing it and hope for the best.
Given the way society is currently set up, if we pursue space colonization then it'll become a luxury for billionaires to escape an unlivable planet. Worse, the hoards of the capital will have even less desires to fix things.
(This is not some doomer or accelerationist take, just hating on billionaires.)
This is my assumption about what's likely to occur as well. And a song about it: King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard - Mars for the Rich
If we could agree on such a great project and make it happen, that would have a massive benefit for our overcoming the very problem you are talking about.
If we could just agree to do something great together then that in itself would solve a lot of social ills.
Cooperation, not competition. That is the key.
Great, that covers the first generation in charge. What are the long term educational, economic, political, social, and cultural institutions that will keep things going when everyone alive will have been born on the ship/station, and nobody has first hand knowledge of how it started?
Outer Wilds feels
Mine went to
Tap for spoiler
outer wilds
😁
I don't remember a ring world in the outer wilds. Maybe a slight similarity to the twin hourglass plants.
It's in the DLC, but frankly it wasn't that good imo. The base game was easily top 10 games I ever played, the DLC I didn't even finish.
In what way? I think usually these sort of designs rely on using some as yet undiscovered super strength material to hold them together. Other than that they are just a big Engineering problem. The Physics is sound.
I mean unless you’re the lucky one who gets to find Jehuty…
Seeing such a post upvoted on solarpunk gives me hope.
I don't think the space race and space habitat is the way forward, but there is a future timeline that is sustainable and technologically advanced.
I am happy that some people still believe in it.
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I have that book somewhere. Nice illustrations.
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