When I started to hear from friends and about acquaintances in pods, their commitment seemed astounding. People in a quar-bub, theoretically, create hermetically sealed modern covenants in order to share each other’s resources, sit on each other’s couches, eat each other’s snacks. Quarantine pods - also known as quarantine bubbles - are maybe best summarized by MIT Technology Review’s Gideon Lichfield as a small group of people “not taking precautions with each other but taking precautions with the outside world.” These bubbles were cautiously sanctioned by public-health officials across the land as it became clear that lockdown measures would last more than a few weeks. I knew social upheaval was on the horizon for my friend after she texted me a plaintive message: “My pod is not very good at podding.” Her quarantine pod formed with pandemic micro-era precision in early spring of 2020.
To keep large numbers of people alive in huge, sealed containers in space, “we will need to think about establishing communities of living things.Photo-Illustration: by the Cut Photos Getty Images “We haven’t even perfected making life-supporting architectures on our own life-bearing planet,” she said in an email. Rachel Armstrong, a professor of experimental architecture at Newcastle University in England, cautions that the infrastructure challenges are only part of the story. It will be a revolution in the very nature of civilization.” Who owns the future? “But once we establish autonomous robotic industry in space to benefit the Earth, it will cost us nothing to scale it up to giant proportions. “People imagine trying to build these great worlds within the framework of the current economic and political regime, and that doesn’t make sense,” he says. Making that scenario a reality will require a lot of society-wide changes, says Phil Metzger, a University of Central Florida planetary physicist who works on technology for space mining. “Settlements will get bigger and better, and move farther and farther out, until O’Neill’s vision is eventually fulfilled.” “This will provide a market for lunar and asteroid materials, and a space mining industry will develop,” Globus says. Those would be followed by ever-larger settlements in low orbit around the Earth, then located farther out.
He sees the process beginning with private space stations, similar in scale to today’s International Space Station, some of which could be space hotels. Globus agrees, and has co-authored a whole book ("The High Frontier: An Easier Way") that fills in the details. Meanwhile, heavy industry would be moved off-Earth “to preserve this unique gem of a planet.” Space taxis could carry visitors from colony to colony in a day or less. “And you could have a recreational one that keeps zero G so you can go flying with your own wings,” he said. Some might be space farms or interplanetary wilderness areas.
“I don’t like the ‘Plan B’ idea that we want to go into space so we have a backup planet.” How to get from six to a trillionīezos describes an idyllic life aboard his future space colonies, each of which could have its own theme and function. “We want to go to space to save the Earth,” he said in 2016. Musk has argued that humans need large outposts on Mars in case Earth is destroyed by an asteroid or is rendered uninhabitable by some terrestrial cataclysm.īezos scoffs at that kind of thinking. In endorsing O’Neill’s approach, Bezos has set himself starkly apart from SpaceX founder Elon Musk, his rival space-obsessed billionaire entrepreneur. O'Neill during an interview with Johnny Carson in 1977. As the population expands, people would simply build new cylinders to accommodate their needs. Mirrors would pipe in sunshine, and solar panels would provide continuous electricity.
They would be constructed from material mined from the moon and delivered into space using enormous electromagnetic catapults. O’Neill’s proposed colonies would be mile-wide spheres or cylinders, spinning to create artificial gravity on the inside.