{"id":19188,"date":"2016-10-29T17:52:03","date_gmt":"2016-10-29T09:52:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wp-productionenv-bjg9h2g2bgg5b8aa.southeastasia-01.azurewebsites.net\/news\/where-does-jeff-bezos-foresee-putting-space-colonists-inside-oneill-cylinders\/"},"modified":"2016-10-29T17:52:03","modified_gmt":"2016-10-29T09:52:03","slug":"where-does-jeff-bezos-foresee-putting-space-colonists-inside-oneill-cylinders","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/news\/where-does-jeff-bezos-foresee-putting-space-colonists-inside-oneill-cylinders\/","title":{"rendered":"Where does Jeff Bezos foresee putting space colonists? Inside O\u2019Neill cylinders"},"content":{"rendered":"<figure id=\"attachment_285545\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-285545\" style=\"width: 630px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><img fetchpriority=\"high\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full-width wp-image-285545\" src=\"https:\/\/cdn.geekwire.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/10\/161028-oneill-cylinder-630x496.jpeg\" alt=\"O'Neill cylinder\" width=\"630\" height=\"496\" srcset=\"https:\/\/cdn.geekwire.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/10\/161028-oneill-cylinder-630x496.jpeg 630w, https:\/\/cdn.geekwire.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/10\/161028-oneill-cylinder-768x605.jpeg 768w, https:\/\/cdn.geekwire.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/10\/161028-oneill-cylinder-1240x977.jpeg 1240w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 630px) 100vw, 630px\"><figcaption data-nosnippet=\"\" id=\"caption-attachment-285545\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">This artist\u2019s conception from the 1970s shows the interior of an O\u2019Neill cylinder. (Credit: NASA)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p>SpaceX\u2019s Elon Musk wants&nbsp;to settle humans on Mars. Others talk about a Moon Village. But Seattle billionaire Jeff Bezos has a different kind of off-Earth home in mind when he talks about having millions of people living and working in space.<\/p>\n<p>His long-range vision focuses on a decades-old concept for huge artificial habitats that are best known today as O\u2019Neill cylinders.<\/p>\n<p>The concept was laid out in 1976 in a classic book by physicist Gerard O\u2019Neill, titled \u201cThe High Frontier.\u201d The idea is to create cylinder-shaped structures in outer space, and give them enough of a spin that residents on the inner surface of the cylinder could live their lives in Earth-style gravity. The habitat\u2019s interior would be illuminated either by reflected sunlight or sunlike artificial light.<\/p>\n<p>O\u2019Neill cylinders and their ilk have become a standby for hard science-fiction stories. For example, in&nbsp;Kim Stanley Robinson\u2019s \u201c2312,\u201d hollowed-out asteroids known as \u201cterraria\u201d&nbsp;house communities that travel back and forth between planets. In the movie \u201cInterstellar,\u201d&nbsp;Matthew McConaghey\u2019s character finds himself inside an O\u2019Neill-type outpost named Cooper Station&nbsp;near Saturn.<\/p>\n<p><iframe title=\"Interstellar - Cooper Station Scene 1080p HD\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/LRT0GGTWYnM?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen=\"\" data-ratio=\"0.5625\" data-width=\"800\" data-height=\"450\" style=\"display: block; margin: 0px; width: 800px; height: 450px;\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>Bezos&nbsp;is said to have&nbsp;talked up the concept in the 1980s, when he was a starry-eyed student at Princeton. Three decades&nbsp;later, he\u2019s the CEO of Amazon with a net worth estimated at $67 billion, and with his own space venture called Blue Origin.<\/p>\n<p>So far, Blue Origin has launched a reusable rocket ship called New Shepard on uncrewed suborbital test flights. But Bezos has much bigger ambitions, for an orbital launch system called New Glenn and a super-rocket called New Armstrong.<\/p>\n<p>During last weekend\u2019s Pathfinder Awards banquet at Seattle\u2019s Museum of Flight, Bezos referred to&nbsp;his long-term goal of having millions of people living and working in space, as well as his enabling goal of creating the \u201cheavy lifting infrastructure\u201d to make that happen.<\/p>\n<p>In Bezos\u2019 view, dramatically reducing the cost of access to space is a key step toward those goals.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThen we get to see Gerard O\u2019Neill\u2019s ideas start to come to life, and many of the other ideas from science fiction,\u201d Bezos said. \u201cThe dreamers come first. It\u2019s always the science-fiction guys: They think of everything first, and then the builders come along and they make it happen. But it takes time.\u201d<\/p>\n<p><iframe title=\"Jeff Bezos discusses space flight and his vision for Blue Origin\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/VNwE3sRWxHw?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen=\"\" data-ratio=\"0.5625\" data-width=\"800\" data-height=\"450\" style=\"display: block; margin: 0px; width: 800px; height: 450px;\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>For Musk, the prime driver behind settling people on Mars is to provide a backup plan for humanity in the event of a planetwide catastrophe&nbsp;\u2013 an asteroid strike, for example, or environmental ruin, or a species-killing pandemic. Bezos sees a different imperative at work: humanity\u2019s&nbsp;growing need for energy.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWe need to go into space if we want to continue growing civilization,\u201d he explained. \u201cIf you take baseline energy usage on Earth and compound it at just 3 percent per year for less than 500 years, you have to cover the entire surface of the Earth in solar cells. That\u2019s just not going to happen.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Some might say the limits to growth will force civilization into a static condition, but Bezos sees space industry as the frontier for continued growth.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cI predict that in the next few hundred years, all heavy industry will move off planet. It will be just way more convenient to do it in space, where you have better access to resources, better access to 24\/7 solar power,\u201d he said last weekend. \u201cSolar power on Earth is not that great, because the planet shades us half the time. In space, you get solar power all the time. So there\u2019ll be a lot of advantages to doing heavy manufacturing there, and Earth will end up zoned residential and light industry.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>The way Bezos sees it, in-space power generation and manufacturing is the answer, rather than sending a million people to Mars.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWe want to go to space to save the Earth,\u201d Bezos said. \u201cI don\u2019t like the \u2018Plan B\u2019 idea that we want to go to space so we have a backup planet. \u2026 We have sent probes to every planet in this solar system, and believe me, this is the best planet. There is no doubt. This is the one that you want to protect.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Hundreds of years from now, will Bezos\u2019 strategy win out, or will Musk\u2019s? Both, or neither? It may seem airy-fairy to even consider the question&nbsp;\u2013 until you realize that hundreds of millions of dollars are being spent right now to turn those science-fiction visions into realities.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This artist\u2019s conception from the 1970s shows the interior of an O\u2019Neill cylinder. (Credit: NASA) SpaceX\u2019s Elon Musk wants&nbsp;to settle humans on Mars. Others talk about a Moon Village. But Seattle billionaire Jeff Bezos has a different kind of off-Earth home in mind when he talks about having millions of people living and working in [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[509,291,1046,4922],"class_list":["post-19188","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","tag-blue-origin","tag-commercial-space","tag-jeff-bezos","tag-space-habitats"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19188"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19188"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19188\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19188"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19188"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19188"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}