Colonies in Space

By the year 2050, the earth may be dangerously overpopulated and polluted. Even so, says a Princeton University scientist, there might be a way out for some of the world's teeming billions. By that time, according to Physicist Gerard K. O'Neill, streams of earthlings could well be en route to comfortable new homes in space.

The idea should not be lightly dismissed as a science-fiction daydream. O'Neill has impressive credentials, among them his conception of the colliding-beam storage ring principle, which has been used in the design of some of the world's most powerful particle accelerators. His scheme for space colonies was recently the subject of a day-long scientific meeting in Princeton, and will soon be discussed at length in the journal Physics Today. Basically, O'Neill proposes building completely self-contained space communities in the form of cylinders some 16 miles long and four miles in diameter. The cylindrical worlds would contain water, an atmosphere, earth-style farm land, fish, birds and other fauna. They would even have their own earthlike gravity, in the form of centrifugal force produced by rotation of the cylinders. With these and other amenities, the inhabitants (eventually as many as 200,000 people in each) could easily live, work and play on the cylinders' inner surfaces. For power, the space people could rely on electricity produced by pollution-free solar panels. Movable mirrors would direct sunlight through windows of the cylinders and could be manipulated to create the effect of night and day and even of changing seasons.

Ferry Trips. The site of these colonies would most likely be one or more of the five moving locations in space (first identified by the 18th century Italian-French mathematician Joseph Louis Lagrange) where the gravitational and centrifugal forces of the earth-moon system cancel each other out.* Any object placed at these points would remain there rather than fall toward the earth or moon. For his first stations, O'Neill proposes two 1,000-yard-long minicylinders for only 10,000 people, which would require the transport and assembly in space of some 10,000 tons of material from earth. These basic components would be ferried piecemeal by successive trips of NASA'S proposed space shuttle and space tug.

Later, as the technology for space-building improved, larger colonies could be constructed. But they would always have to be stationed in attached, side-by-side pairs, rotating in opposite directions to counter the gyroscopic tugging that would be caused by a single rotating cylinder. Even material from the moon, asteroids and other planets would eventually be used. Finally, so many people might be resettled in space that the earth's population could be reduced to what O'Neill regards as a comfortable optimum: the 1910 level of 1.2 billion people. Then, he adds, the earth would become "a worldwide park, a beautiful place to visit for a vacation."

*The two most stable points always lie in the moon's orbit around the earth, at a distance of 240,000 miles ahead of the moon and 240,000 miles behind it.

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