Cities In Space- Part 3: The O'Neill Cylinder
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- Опубліковано 6 жов 2024
- A look at a 1970s proposal for a massive space colony, the O'Neill Cylinder
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Thanks for your insightful video. Your vision of the Oneill cylinder is just like the original design by Gerrard Oneill.
By the time we actually have the infrastructure in place to build these things, I would imagine that we might be much more technologically advanced than we are today - nearly fifty years after that amazing original concept.
Today, we can emit nearly any kind of light that we wish to produce, even growing lush vegetation with no external light necessary.
We also know more about the negative effects of radiation from our sun and beyond, so the windows of the Oneill cylinder probably won't be included.
Imagine the "city" part of the habitat being located within the first 15 - 20 floors of the inside surface. This would make the entire forest, garden, park surface within the cylinder, actually a garden top design - with the first 200 feet (of depth) inside the cylinder being the city part. But, with the artificial lighting, these spaces could also still support healthy plants, and people.
Imagine the stacked cylinder concept (one inside the other, 4 cylinders deep) with the innermost core being zero-g, the next cylinder (bigger, and surrounding the center) could be sized just large enough to mimic Lunar gravity (17% = 2250 feet radiating out from the center). The next cylinder around that one would be sized to mimic Mars gravity, and the final, outermost cylinder would be Earth standard gravity. There would still be more than 2 kilometers between the bottom of the Mars cylinder and the gardens and forests of the outermost Earth gravity cylinder.
A lot of liberties could be taken with that surface - the one beneath the Mars cylinder and above the Earth gravity surface.
The whole cylinder (or neighborhood of cylinders) could be surrounded by a protective layer of rock harvested from asteroid scraps. They could be held in place much like a Hesco structure that we use for protection in Afghanistan.
And all along the outside surface of this Hesco structure would be built solar panels for 24/7 power availability. The Hesco structure could be built thick enough to block radiation and perhaps thick enough to store supplies of water ice and/or other chemicals that we choose to keep handy. The entire apparatus could be moved by giant solar sails that would work to relocate the neighborhood from one location to another, or just for station keeping efforts.
Just some thoughts to consider. Thanks again for your thought provoking video.
The idea of this plan including the mechanisms necessary for Earth and her systems to repair and rejuvenate rather than just leave a wrecked polluted mess behind is most attractive.
My sister is environmental activist and I tried to tell and show her space is the answer but she does not listen but does not give any solutions and just complains.
Nick, introduce your sister to Earthship Biotecture. Research it yourself to see how incredibly self-sufficient they are. Imagine every concept that makes an Oneill cylinder popular, then miniaturize this down to just one home.
When you recognize that Earthships (especially the most modern ones) are the most ecologically sound and energy efficient homes that can be built, you can scale this concept up to a orbital ring, and Oneill cylinder.
I wouldn't recommend Earthships if I hadn't lived in one for a month. They truly are a modest modern miracle.
Earthships are labor intensive (more than building any other home) but the sense of satisfaction you get from being a part of the building crew is pretty satisfying.
Ask how they plan to allow for ~12 billion people we'll have by mid-century to have energy and living conditions like an affluent nation today.
Those people are coming, and it is un-ethical to say that they (usually poor, usually brown people) shouldn't have more children (who watches the watchers? Who polices the population police?) and it is intensely un-ethical to say that they shouldn't expect more than poverty and no heat and light at night, or to suggest that they and everybody doesn't deserve a modern high-energy standard of living.
Again, who watches the watchers, and who decides which people get a decent standard of living and whose children starve)
Pose it as an ethical challenge to them, and that anybody who is hoping for a lesser developed future or universal poverty is un-ethical and also nonsensical and just plain silly.
A high-energy modern affluent standard of living is ethical as well as profitable all the way around, and it is entirely possible with this real-world engineering.
Good standards of living includes a good environment.
With the resources and wealth of the inner Solar system we could not only survive but thrive during +6 degree C warming, or an ice age, or Yellowstone.
Their only alternative is poverty for all and waiting for a species-wide die-off.
This is the planet we'll terraform, repairing the damage we've done, and we won't do it if we stay bottled up down here, fighting wars over oil and eventually water.
I'll argue that these things are not possible without a healthy Earthly population and industrial base.
The question for any colonization scheme from the rubber-science Martian colony or the entirely fanciful interstellar ark, is how much industrial base and what sort of tool-kit and what library of skills is needed for any colony suggestion to be completely self-sufficient from Earth industries?
The space habitats we reasonably designed (the O'Neill "Bernal sphere Island One" or the Stanford Toruses are ~95% built from space resources fairly easily as dumb bulk structure, but the rest is finely made parts from down here.
How long before a space manufacturing base can build *_everything_* that a modern technological civilization requires?
Hand-waving about nano-tech 3D assembly doesn't matter: What can we talk about building now, and how much industry and what population base can we design based on facts now?
So, it's never about moving to space and wrecking the Earth. It's always about helping the Earth by moving our worst industries to space, where they're done better.
One day.. I hope
Stellar 🙂
This design was never worked out in any great detail. O'Neill presented it only as an extrapolation of the sorts of things physically possible, to a space-faring civilization ~80 years after the first "island One" smaller habitats.
O'Neill himself wrote that it wasn't entirely accurate, and that any such farther future habitat almost certainly wouldn't look like this.
As it happens, it is not feasible:
You may not have large window areas to the inside, because they're a clear path inward for cosmic rays. There is no-where near enough atmosphere to block cosmic rays that come in through the windows.
It is not at all advisable to have an object with a long center of mass spinning around the long axis. It will want to tumble and spin end over end.
Depictions of this have two cylinders counter-rotating to that they can remain stable only in pointing.
Yes, you could use active stabilization means to counter the instability, but a good engineer wouldn't design to defy the laws of physics and then apply complexity to overcome the inherent design flaws.
The Summer Studies determined that the largest pressure vessel we could build with then-known construction methods and common materials, to spin for 1G and hold shielding and everything inside, was ~30km diameter, by maybe .75 times that length or possibly slightly more if attention is paid to making the rim massive enough for stability. See the "Kalpana" space habitat studies, drum shape.
Building up to the space manufacturing infrastructure to make the early smaller habitats like the Stanford Torus, might take ~25 years, and cost like many other large infrastructure or industrial developments down here.
Nobody who's responsible suggests anything as large as a colony for millions, starting with what we could start building now. We'd need to build the tools to build the tools to build the manufacturing capability for anything so large. But there is nothing outlandish S.F. about it.
Such colonies could be built anywhere in space such as orbiting Mars, or among the moons of Jupiter.
Before we can talk about more than a large long-term base on Mars or the Moon, it needs to be proven that we can live long-term and stay healthy in low G. That means "proof", not S.F., not wishes and hopes and try it and see, not maybe in the future biomechanically engineering ourselves and our offspring for low G.
Prove that first, and we can go on to talk about why space colonies at Mars or elsewhere are still the better or only way for large-scale, long-term habitation off-Earth.
We've had people continuously on Antarctica for decades, but it is not a "colony" to which people will retire or raise children.
Similarly at Mars or elsewhere. The living facilities will be in space habitats.