Dissent, Revolution and Liberty Beyond Earth by Charles S. Cockell

Author:Charles S. Cockell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Springer International Publishing, Cham

8.6 Destinations: Room for Freedom

Historically Earth itself has provided ‘room’ to escape tyranny ; the North American colonists were able to use the ‘room’ of their undeveloped continent to evade what they saw as the tyranny of the British, and begin their own experiment in civilisation-building. Yet Earth itself is finite; Earth itself is merely a very large and very well equipped ‘habitat’. Is it possible that a large enough extraterrestrial habitat would provide room for liberty?

The background to modern space colony studies has been reviewed by some of the pioneers themselves, such as O’Neill (1976) (Chap. 1). Well-founded visions of human life in space dated back to the early twentieth-century works of Tsiolkovsky (1920) and Bernal (1929). However O’Neill’s landmark study (1976) presented the first significant space colony designs, based on plausible materials and technologies, to build on the lessons of the first generation of space exploration, including the results of the Apollo missions to the moon.

As indicated above, in O’Neill’s scheme, large near-Earth habitats would be merely the first stepping stones into space. Their initial economic justification would be to sustain large populations of workers who would build orbital solar power stations (SPS), the output of which would be sold back to the Earth. Arguing from a premise that 10,000 workers in space would be needed to kick-start a significant industrial presence there (116) O’Neill proposed as a model starter colony his ‘Island One’ , a sphere ~500 m in diameter, rotating twice per minute to provide Earth-equivalent gravity. This would be constructed largely from lunar resources and would host 10,000 people living at urban population densities. Island Two would be an expanded version with a population scaled up to 140,000 people, and O’Neill’s Island Three (64ff) was to be a pair of rotating cylinders each 32 km long and hosting a population of 20 million (69).

O’Neill did postulate larger structures as engineering possibilities, such as a fourfold expansion of Island Three, the largest available with 1970s materials (6), which could support some 160 million people. Habitats much larger are conceivable. The ‘McKendree cylinder’ was originally proposed at NASA’s ‘Turning Goals into Reality’ conference in 2000 by NASA engineer Tom McKendree (2000). An expansion of O’Neill’s Island Three built with such modern materials as carbon nanotubes rather than steel, the habitat would consist of two cylinders approximately 460 km in radius and 4600 km in length, containing 13 million km2 of living space: nearly as much area as the nation of Russia.

Meanwhile, some insight into likely habitat types on planetary surfaces comes from a consideration of plans for the colonisation Mars.

A recent design of a near-future surface habitat on Mars was part of Project Boreas, by the British Interplanetary Society (Cockell 2005), a study of a base at the Martian North Pole designed to support 10 people through a Martian winter. As described in a paper on base design by Greene (p 32–48) the living spaces would consist of seven cylindrical mobile habitats. The usable habitable area would total 289 m2, or some 29 m2 per person, equivalent to some 35,000 people per km2.

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