- Dec 17, 2010
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Mars: I've always been a fan of Mars because I think I could more easily imagine how such a thing could grow from a village of 500 to a town of 10,000 to a city of millions to a planet of billions. That is, much more immediate benefits. People living there and having lives, but growing and accumulating in economy, culture, and infrastructure.
My misconception: The O'Neil cylinder - a huge steel can 32km long and 8km wide spun up so people can live with spin-grav on the inside, always seemed the opposite to me. I thought it had to be built and thoroughly completed before anyone could move in. But it's like building the whole of New York City before the first person moves in. Also, think about the financing! It's like building thousands of air-craft carriers in one go, on a MASSIVE mortgage, before you get your first paying customer! I imagined a tin can with everyone living in the inside spun up wall as the 'ground'. We'll call this the Centre. The Centre is sealed off from the radiation and vacuum of space - and the whole region is filled with air and gardens and even ecosystems and rivers and shallow lakes. If this perfectly climate controlled interior is where people live, how on earth do you built it in bits? It has to be delivered in one go.
The tin can myth. I had been influenced by retro-futurist art that mostly emphasised living inside the finished Centre. Like it was just a giant tin-can. Viewed like that, we can forget how vast and thick the walls of this habitat could be. But the walls themselves are probably better thought of as giant spinning space-stations in their own right. They would be steel decks many stories tall (or thick?), more like air-craft carriers than the wall of a tin can.
Construction zones are dangerous. Imagine the safety implications of living in a construction zone in zero gravity? This is why I thought we'd have a city of a million on Mars well before a full O'Neill Cylinder was built. A city on a planet has gravity. It keeps stuff in place. Drop a spanner? It's there. On the ground. Crash a truck? Poor building falls down. But that building didn't explode into some kind of Kessler Syndrome if you're building an O'Neill cylinder around a planet. Which is why, come to think of it, we should only build them around asteroids with low enough gravity to not cascade into a disaster like that. Let's not create a snowballing cascading chain-reaction of shards of metal travelling at 9km per second to shred our habitat and people to death! My point: living near a construction zone is dangerous enough, but living near one in zero gravity could be really interesting. I honestly could not visualise how to do this incrementally.
Tube-rings are the answer. The following image is where it all clicked for me. It's less art, and more a construction manual. I finally get it. Tubes. Added together. Accumulating. Growing an economy with an attractive lifestyle as you go, but with accumulating benefits for all as you do grow. Build it like this, and each tube is a viable space-station in its own right. The whole thing accumulates. The village lives in the 'walls' of what will become an O'Neill Cylinder - and as we add more tubes it becomes a town, city, and finally a full nation.
Accumulating rings
What would it feel like to live there? Let's orientate ourselves to this thing. It's spinning around, so let's call the outside steel deck pulling your feet towards it 'Down'. Going in towards the Centre is going 'Up' to the top floor. You live inside these tube-rings - each of them several stories tall.
Outside is covered in steel decking and meters of asteroid dirt 'glued' to the surface probably with just frozen water. This protects against cosmic radiation, solar radiation, and even micrometeorite impacts. Drones could fly over or camera towers could stick out that scan around, monitoring which areas might need some more dirt to be glued to the ring. So that's outside, under your feet. It also protects you from any loose spanner or tug boat that might go off course and crash.
The Rings are like living inside an aircraft carrier custom build for civilian comfort. These are attractive enough places to live in their own right. There might be big malls or parks in the tube rings themselves. After all, we're talking about building the first O'Neil cylinders here. We're imagining a few decades from now, well before the solar system economy is huge enough to have a factory assembly building these behemoths for more custom-built worlds for the human race to expand into.
So in these early days, the ring habitats have got to be functional AND fun, while the next stage of rings are built.
Stages: Let's say they build new sections 4 rings wide - somewhere safe away from the main habitat. When completed, they ever so gently tug-boat it in and dock with the main rings. But when do they start to fill the Centre - so mums and dads can take their kids up to enjoy the vast parks there? Would it be every time a new mile of rings had been added? All they have to do is put the steel decking over the ends and then you can terraform the Centre. If you're lucky enough to live in the main habitat, you just catch a lift 'Up' to enjoy them. They would probably feel like vast rooftop gardens - except without a view of the city below. If you're living in a new ring on the outside of the Centre and hasn't been sealed in yet, don't worry. You catch a train to your neighbour's ring and go 'Up' to enjoy the Centre. And as each new terraformed Centre was finished, would they leave the steel inner walls in place as a safety measure until the whole thing was finished? After all, it's still a construction zone. Then when finished, they start dismantling the Central Walls - creating the one huge Central ecology we've all dreamed about for so long.
TBM: Or some imagine a continuous spiral building process like a Tunnel Boring Machine, continually spiralling out. The other side of the O'Neil Cylinder has a big dock for space tugs to unload asteroid dirt. A conveyor belt chugs this stuff down to the smelting factory and forge. Finished components and steel plates are trained across the rings to the construction site - and fed into the ring building machine. This avoids having people constructing in zero g, and can run more intuitive process and factories like we do here on earth.
So now I'm open to both Mars and Belters both having a viable race to the first city of a million people. And it's exciting to not have a clue who will win.
For more try these
My misconception: The O'Neil cylinder - a huge steel can 32km long and 8km wide spun up so people can live with spin-grav on the inside, always seemed the opposite to me. I thought it had to be built and thoroughly completed before anyone could move in. But it's like building the whole of New York City before the first person moves in. Also, think about the financing! It's like building thousands of air-craft carriers in one go, on a MASSIVE mortgage, before you get your first paying customer! I imagined a tin can with everyone living in the inside spun up wall as the 'ground'. We'll call this the Centre. The Centre is sealed off from the radiation and vacuum of space - and the whole region is filled with air and gardens and even ecosystems and rivers and shallow lakes. If this perfectly climate controlled interior is where people live, how on earth do you built it in bits? It has to be delivered in one go.
The tin can myth. I had been influenced by retro-futurist art that mostly emphasised living inside the finished Centre. Like it was just a giant tin-can. Viewed like that, we can forget how vast and thick the walls of this habitat could be. But the walls themselves are probably better thought of as giant spinning space-stations in their own right. They would be steel decks many stories tall (or thick?), more like air-craft carriers than the wall of a tin can.
Construction zones are dangerous. Imagine the safety implications of living in a construction zone in zero gravity? This is why I thought we'd have a city of a million on Mars well before a full O'Neill Cylinder was built. A city on a planet has gravity. It keeps stuff in place. Drop a spanner? It's there. On the ground. Crash a truck? Poor building falls down. But that building didn't explode into some kind of Kessler Syndrome if you're building an O'Neill cylinder around a planet. Which is why, come to think of it, we should only build them around asteroids with low enough gravity to not cascade into a disaster like that. Let's not create a snowballing cascading chain-reaction of shards of metal travelling at 9km per second to shred our habitat and people to death! My point: living near a construction zone is dangerous enough, but living near one in zero gravity could be really interesting. I honestly could not visualise how to do this incrementally.
Tube-rings are the answer. The following image is where it all clicked for me. It's less art, and more a construction manual. I finally get it. Tubes. Added together. Accumulating. Growing an economy with an attractive lifestyle as you go, but with accumulating benefits for all as you do grow. Build it like this, and each tube is a viable space-station in its own right. The whole thing accumulates. The village lives in the 'walls' of what will become an O'Neill Cylinder - and as we add more tubes it becomes a town, city, and finally a full nation.
Accumulating rings
What would it feel like to live there? Let's orientate ourselves to this thing. It's spinning around, so let's call the outside steel deck pulling your feet towards it 'Down'. Going in towards the Centre is going 'Up' to the top floor. You live inside these tube-rings - each of them several stories tall.
Outside is covered in steel decking and meters of asteroid dirt 'glued' to the surface probably with just frozen water. This protects against cosmic radiation, solar radiation, and even micrometeorite impacts. Drones could fly over or camera towers could stick out that scan around, monitoring which areas might need some more dirt to be glued to the ring. So that's outside, under your feet. It also protects you from any loose spanner or tug boat that might go off course and crash.
The Rings are like living inside an aircraft carrier custom build for civilian comfort. These are attractive enough places to live in their own right. There might be big malls or parks in the tube rings themselves. After all, we're talking about building the first O'Neil cylinders here. We're imagining a few decades from now, well before the solar system economy is huge enough to have a factory assembly building these behemoths for more custom-built worlds for the human race to expand into.
So in these early days, the ring habitats have got to be functional AND fun, while the next stage of rings are built.
Stages: Let's say they build new sections 4 rings wide - somewhere safe away from the main habitat. When completed, they ever so gently tug-boat it in and dock with the main rings. But when do they start to fill the Centre - so mums and dads can take their kids up to enjoy the vast parks there? Would it be every time a new mile of rings had been added? All they have to do is put the steel decking over the ends and then you can terraform the Centre. If you're lucky enough to live in the main habitat, you just catch a lift 'Up' to enjoy them. They would probably feel like vast rooftop gardens - except without a view of the city below. If you're living in a new ring on the outside of the Centre and hasn't been sealed in yet, don't worry. You catch a train to your neighbour's ring and go 'Up' to enjoy the Centre. And as each new terraformed Centre was finished, would they leave the steel inner walls in place as a safety measure until the whole thing was finished? After all, it's still a construction zone. Then when finished, they start dismantling the Central Walls - creating the one huge Central ecology we've all dreamed about for so long.
TBM: Or some imagine a continuous spiral building process like a Tunnel Boring Machine, continually spiralling out. The other side of the O'Neil Cylinder has a big dock for space tugs to unload asteroid dirt. A conveyor belt chugs this stuff down to the smelting factory and forge. Finished components and steel plates are trained across the rings to the construction site - and fed into the ring building machine. This avoids having people constructing in zero g, and can run more intuitive process and factories like we do here on earth.
So now I'm open to both Mars and Belters both having a viable race to the first city of a million people. And it's exciting to not have a clue who will win.
For more try these
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