A million Americans living in outer space by the year 2000? Not only is it possible, says this Princeton physicist, but it may well be the only long-term answer to earth’s pollution and overpopulation.
Dr. Gerard K. O’Niell
Several months ago Penthouse published an interview with Gene Roddenberry, creator of the incredibly successfuI science-fiction television show “Star Trek.” This month our interview returns to the realm of science fiction: pollution-free. earth-like space colonies, 240.000 miles from earth, on which men, women, and children could enjoy an environment of clean air and water, lush vegetation, rolling hills, riverred valleys, and sunlight. However, the subject of this month’s interview, Dr. Gerard K. O’Niell of Princeton University, insists that his vision is rooted in fact, not fantasy. and that within a hundred years most of the inhabitants of earth could be living quite comfortably in such space colonies. In fact, O’Niell says that the first 10,000 people could be living in space by the early 1990s — and he has some impressive scientific support. Including NASA. which provided a research- study grant at the beginning of last year.
Research on this revolutionary idea began in 1969, when O’Niell suggested to an introductory physics class that humanity might not be forever bound to a planetary sphere, that it might be possible to inhabit free space in an environment at least as hospitable as that of the earth. The idea. originally suggested to brighten up potentially tedious physics exercises for the students, grew into O’Niell’s hobby. occupying more of his time as he became increasingly aware that such an idea was much more than a dream for the distant future. After several years of unsuccessful attempts to have his studies published. a small space-colonization conference was held in Princeton in 1974. O’Niell’s notions began to capture the imaginations of many professional leaders. and this past summer twenty-eight of them met in a joint Stan ford University-NASA Research Center study for ten weeks to discuss the engineering aspects of the space-colonization idea. Their most important conclusion was that every conceivable problem posed by O’Niell’s project could be solved by present-day technology.
Building upon NASA’s space-shuttle project (expected to be operational by 1981). O’Niell would have people and supplies shipped to the moon to mine the materials necessary for construction of the colonies. Titanium, oxides, aluminum, and other materials found in the lunar soil would be transported by a magnetic-propulsion system called a mass driver to L5, a stable area in the earth-moon zone named for its discoverer, French mathematician Joseph Louis Lagrange. This site. which follows the moon in its orbit. was chosen because anything put into orbit there would continue to circulate at that location forever. L5 forms one point of an equilateral triangle, with the earth and the moon as the other two points. (There is also a corresponding L4 stable zone.) The space colonies or “habitats” would be constructed in space, and could be spherical, cylindrical. or wheel-shaped. In cylindrical form the cylinders would range in length from one kilometer to thirty-two kilometers and in radius from 100 meters to 3,200 meters. They would be positioned with their axes toward the sun and would contain from 10.000 to 20 million people. Joined at the ends by a network of cables. the cylinders of the smaller habitats would counter-rotate once every twenty seconds in order to simulate earth’s gravity.
Within the cylinders strips of land (“valleys”) would alternate with strips of transparent panels (“solars”). Natural sunlight would be regulated by mirrors outside the cylinders to create an artificial day-night cycle. The first colony might possibly have a climate similar to that of Hawaii, but larger colonies could have the climate of the inhabitants’ choice, whether of Vermont or the Caribbean. The landscape would include hills, valleys, streams, and lakes. Agriculture and heavy industry would be carried on separately from the living areas. Waste would be recycled.
Initially, most materials would come from the moon, with the earth providing the rest. Eventually, no materials would be transported from the earth because the asteroids could be mined for the needed ores that are scarce on the moon.
The Apollo moon project cost $39 billion in today’s dollars, without providing a dollar return. The government’s Project Independence to reduce our dependence on foreign energy sources will cost between $600 to $2,000 billion. O’Niell’s project would require an initial investment of $100 billion. Each succeeding colony would cost less because materials could be mined on the moon and manufactured in the colonies. Not only would the space-colonization project provide jobs, but the space facilities would also build satellite solar-power stations to provide much needed energy to the earth via microwave relay. Therefore, if all went well, energy and dollar profit returns would more than pay for the investment.
Though there would necessarily be some sociological and psychological readjustments, these readjustments might not be any more difficult than those made by the pioneers who set sail across the Atlantic to settle a strange, mysterious New World. With the earth suffering from overpopulation, waning resources, and extensive pollution, outer space may provide the only way to give our tortured planet time to heal its wounds. With endless space in which to live and grow productively, there is no limit to how far humanity can go.
Forty-eight-year-old Gerard O’Niell, father of three, lives with his wife, Tasha, near the Princeton campus. He has been a leader of scientific groups in the area of elementary-particle physics. His work in high-energy physics has been widely recognized, particularly his design of the colliding-beam storage ring — a machine for making high-energy particles collide to produce energies far higher than those obtainable in the laboratory by other methods.
This Penthouse interview was conducted by James Mitteager and Salvatore Napolitano, with follow-up questions by Richard Ballard. We are also deeply appreciative of research help provided by Dr. O’Niell’s staff at Princeton.
Why did you choose to study the colonization of space, rather than of the moon or some planet?
O’Niell: There are many disadvantages to living on a planetary surface. First of all, solar energy is not available twenty-four hours a day because of the planet’s rotation. Second, the zero gravity that is available in space provides for more efficient manufacturing. For example. in the case of anything large and heavy, much of the effort is spent just holding the object up. Third, there just isn’t enough surface area on the earth and the other planets for unlimited techno logical development. By going into free space and building industrial sites, the possibility of expansion is increased to many thousands of times the land area of the earth.
What is the significance of the area you’ve selected for your study — the L5 Lagrange Liberation Point?
O’Niell: Though not the only place to locate the first habitat. it is convenient because of its stability. A colony positioned at L5 and set at the correct velocity will go on orbiting around that point forever. Colony positions are not confined to this area. however. Ultimately. colonies could be located roughly from the orbit of Venus out to Jupiter and beyond.
What would be the physical characteristics of the first colony?
O’Niell: We are considering a wheel or spherical geometry for the first habitat. Later colonies could be of cylindrical, spherical, or wheel-shaped design, or combinations of several shapes.
The wheel-shaped design studied intensively in 1975 would consist of a tube 130 meters in diameter. bent into a wheel of 1,790-meter diameter. Six large access routes (the spokes of the wheel) would connect to a central hub. The spokes would measure fifteen meters in diameter. The wheel would turn at one revolution per minute. A large, stationary mirror would be over the hub at a forty-five-degree angle to the axis of rotation and would direct sunlight into another set of mirrors, which in turn would reflect it into the interior.
The cylindrical habitats could range in length from one kilometer to thirty-two kilometers and in radius from 100 meters to 3,200 meters. Each habitat would have two cylinders joined at the ends by a network of cables and positioned with their axes toward the sun. And they would counter-rotate, with a rotation period of 21 seconds to 114 seconds, depending upon the size of the habitat.
The interior of the cylinders would be divided into three land areas and three window or solar areas. As in the case of the wheel, sunlight would be regulated by mirrors; these would be at each solar area.
Spherical habitats could be from 500 meters to twenty kilometers in diameter, with a land area up to several hundred square kilometers.
With how many people?
O’Niell: Probably 10,000 in the first model. Later colonies would contain as many as 20 million people.
Would these habitats be constructed on earth and shipped to L5?
O’Niell: No, the only way you can make the concept work, economically, is to get almost all of the materials from the surface of the moon. We are considering sending out from the earth the components of a construction station, which would be similar to a large space station at L5, and simultaneously, or perhaps a little before, sending to the moon an outpost station, which would be able to set up machinery for shipping out raw materials. About 98 percent of the mass for the first colony would come from the surface of the moon.
What materials would have to be exported from earth?
O’Niell: For the construction station I mentioned and the outpost station on the moon, machinery, power supplies, tools, and a chemical-processing plant. That has been mass-budgeted for a total of about 13,000 tons. The raw materials from earth would be mainly liquid hydrogen and possibly some nitrogen and carbon.
Why liquid hydrogen?
O’Niell: We’d want water to make the environment of the first facility fairly lush. We’d need perhaps five tons of water per inhabitant. That would be enough to have a good relative humidity in the atmosphere, many growing plants, and even small rivers or lakes. For this purpose, the mass budget of water would be 50,000 tons; we can’t afford to bring that up from the earth. It makes more sense to take about 5,000 tons of liquid hydrogen and combine it with about 45,000 tons of liquid oxygen at L5. The lunar surface material is about 40 percent oxygen by weight; so if you process half a million tons of material (that’s roughly the mass of the first colony), you’d get 200,000 tons of oxygen, which is more than enough.
What materials would come from the moon, and how would they be mined?
O’Niell: By just scooping up 500,000 tons of ordinary lunar soil, without any selection at all, you would get about 30.000 tons of aluminum, 70.000 tons of iron, 15.000 tons of titanium, almost 100,000 tons of silicon. Much of the rest would be oxygen. The moon would give you the construction materials for metals, for glass, and for an atmosphere of oxygen. The operation at the moon would not be so large as you might guess. The 500,000 tons of material, coming out over a period of five or six years, would leave a hole in the moon about five meters deep and about 200 meters by 200 meters. A small bulldozer would find it hard to keep busy over a five or six-year period. The operation could be done with the crew never going more than a few hundred meters away from home base.
What would be the relative distances from the earth to the moon to the L5 region?
O’Niell: L5, the earth, and the moon are the three points of an equilateral triangle. In terms of distance, each leg would be about as far as an Apollo rocket traveled.
How would you transport the material from the moon to L5?
O’Niell: By something called a mass driver, an electromagnetic device using magnetic fields to accelerate small containers we call buckets. These containers would be driven by the magnetic fields up to the lunar-escape velocity; then the buckets would slow down and release payloads of lunar material, compacted in block form. The buckets would, then be recirculated to pick up another payload. It’s a system in which you would have some fancy technology in the buckets themselves. You would have superconducting coils in them, but the buckets would be very small, with a total weight of about ten pounds each. Since you would never throw them away, you wouldn’t waste anything.
What would it all cost?
O’Niell: About $100 billion. That is from 5 to 15 percent of Project Independence, or two and one-half times the cost of Apollo when measured in today’s dollars. But the first colony would have about 10,000 times the total productivity of everything that has happened in space so far.
You mentioned solar energy earlier. Would solar energy be an adequate source of power for the total needs of the colony?
O’Niell: Oh yes. It would be possible for any conceivable colony, no matter how large, to have a per capita energy usage many times as large as what we have in the United States today. That could go on forever, or at least as long as the sun lasts, which will be a good many billion years.
Specifically, how would solar energy be used?
O’ Neill: The first use would be for growing crops. We would bring sunlight, by way of windows and mirrors, into large growing areas. The second would be for all industrial- process heating to have concentrating solar mirrors — which in free space could be aluminum foil — focusing solar energy on small boilers or on whatever kind of industrial process container or reactor the inhabitants might be using. The third use would be the generation of electrical power for the inhabitants.
“It seems logical and reasonable to me that we have a much better chance of avoiding war by moving into space than by staying exclusively on the surface of the earth.”
You mentioned that the habitats would rotate three times a minute. Will that give us earth-normal gravity or something less?
O’Niell: Probably earth-normal. We want to do it in a conservative way, making sure people retain good health. It would cost very little from a structural point of view.
Would this rotation be obvious to the inhabitants?
O’Niell: Unless the diameter of the habitat were much smaller than the proposed 200 meters, it wouldn’t be detectable.
Would there be any areas inside the colonies that would have less than the earth-normal gravity?
O’Niell: Yes, just climb up a hill, and it would be less. In fact, if you walked up toward the axis of rotation of the habitat, you would weigh less and less as you ascended. By the time you reached the axis itself, you wouldn’t weigh anything.
Although you’ve re-created earth like gravity, would the remainder of the environment seem familiar?
O’Niell: I doubt that anyone would be fooled. There’d be many visual clues that you were in space. If you looked up, you would see that the land and the buildings in a valley area would appear to be leaning toward each other. Even in the larger colonies, if you looked up you would see land as if you were on an airplane 20,000 feet above the earth. So it’s definitely non-earthlike, from that point of view. The main things. such as sunrise, sunset, and vegetation would be very earthlike.
How thick would the walls be? In other words, what amount of mass would protect the inhabitants from space?
O’Niell: A surprisingly small amount. Only a couple of inches of aluminum are required to do the job. There’d probably be quite a bit of soil because of the cosmic rays. In the agricultural growing areas there would probably be about a foot of soil, and in the living areas there might be more than that.
And that would adequately protect us from radiation?
O’Niell: It would not bring you down to an earth-normal level, but it would protect you from the most harmful rays. It would bring you down to a radiation level that is within the limits found on various parts of the earth, and considerably lower than the values that are supposed to be standard and safe for, say, workers in the atomic-energy industry. Moreover, industrial slag could provide additional shielding, bringing radiation down to earthlike levels.
Would the combination of aluminum walls and lunar soil be sufficient to protect the colony from meteor damage, and is that a major concern?
O’Niell: It’s not a very serious concern, as far as we can tell. As you probably know, the very fragile Pioneer spacecraft went through the asteroid belt and out to Jupiter without getting struck at all. Even though our colonies would not be in the asteroid belt, they would be able to take quite a few meteor strikes without damage. For the biggest colonies the mean time between strikes by a one-ton meteoroid is a million years. For the smaller and more frequent meteoroids, the worst that could happen would be a broken window panel. In one of the big colonies, if you break a window panel it would take three years for the air to leak out. Even in the smallest colonies if you lose a panel and you get some kind of rough patch on it within an hour, the amount of pressure would be no greater than that experienced on earth.
You have stated that within 100 years, 90 percent of the earth’s population could be living in space. Would you elaborate?
O’Niell: You have to be careful of the tone of voice. You have to emphasize the “could.” I’m trying to illustrate that it is possible, but I am not advocating such a mass migration But given almost unlimited energy, materials, and a situation that is very favorable for automated construction, tile rate of construction of new land areas could be very fast indeed — so fast, that within periods of fifty to seventy years one could, technically, have tile earth’s population reduced by immigration. But that will depend on how bad our problems have become here, how attractive life is on tile colonies, and tile relative efficiency of manufacturing both here and there.
How would these colonies benefit life on earth?
O’Niell: Probably tile most direct, immediate way would be in making a contribution to solving tile energy problem. If you have something that’s going to be used in free space, or at some high altitude above tile earth, it’s very expensive to ship it out from tile earth’s surface. Tile lift-off costs are very high. If you have tile alternative possibility of a manufacturing facility already in free space, which can use lunar- surface material as tile input for its manufacturing, then you’re in a very favorable position to manufacture large objects cheaply. We’ve looked at tile possibility of building big, fairly conventional, power stations located on an orbit that would keep them over tile same spot on earth and beam microwave power back to earth. Tile numbers seem to work out that this can be done at about one-lentil of what it would cost if done from tile earth’s surface.
When could solar energy be beamed to earth?
O’Niell: I’m impressed by tile fact that when people want to do something badly enough, they seem to work on a very fast timetable. Tile entire atomic bomb project took only three years. Tile Apollo Project took about eight years from tile time tile decision was made until tile first landing. I feel that we could build Model 1 in about thirteen years and have tile first power stations beginning to take up one or two percent of tile electrical load of tile United States a couple of years after that. There are people who think that figure is too ambitious, but tile interesting point is that even tile most conservative types are arguing only about five or ten years. They’re saying maybe mid-1990s or late 1990s rather than late 1980s.
So that compares favorably with Project Independence.
O’Niell: Yes. Project Independence is supposed to be in operation by 1985 and is geared to expanding existing domestic energy sources. What we’re talking about is something that does not use fossil fuels or nuclear fuels, does not produce any atmospheric sulfates, radioactivity, radioactive wastes, or plutonium It would not deplete tile earths dwindling fossil fuel and uranium resources or involve continuing high prices. And after tile first space solar-power station is built, you could very quickly start building more. You could go on almost indefinitely.
Let’s talk about life in tile colonies. Would diet be drastically altered?
O’Niell: In tile early colonies, at least, you might have difficulty finding beef, but on tile other hand, on earth it may not be very easy either. People are more likely to be living on poultry, pork, and such things. You’d probably find vegetables, fruit, salad. There would be a larger variety and a much better quality in tile space colonies because tile growing climate can be carefully controlled. But meat from large animals would be in very short supply.
Is this simply a matter of logistics, tile expense of shipping large animals from earth?
O’Niell: No. In principle, all you would need to do is to ship a pair. But beef cattle start their lives on low-cost, low-value land, which can’t be used for anything else. When you have to build your own land, you want to use it for better purposes.
Would tile agricultural community still be faced with tile same environmental pests?
O’Niell: We would hope not, because you presumably start just with sterile soil, fertilizer, and carefully inspected seeds; so you’d be able to carry out your agriculture without any insecticides or pesticides. If pests did develop, it would be quite possible to sterilize and pump out tile water from tile infested station and simply raise tile temperature to kill everything biological. You could do that for a week or two, then reseed tile area, and start again. That’s another option we don’t have on earth.
What other occupations would tile colonists engage in?
O’Niell: Heavy manufacturing. If tile numbers are right, there will be quite a few hard-hat construction workers and many others involved in power-station construction. I don’t see a great number of design engineers there, because a big design office doesn’t have to be close to tile industry it’s serving and in tile early days space will be at a premium. Presumably, you would want to have only those operations that can be done efficiently on site carried out in tile colonies. Everything else would be done on earth.
Would heavy manufacturing be formed in earth gravity?
O’Niell: No, it would be done in zero gravity or perhaps .01 gravity. You could simply rotate a construction area very slowly and therefore produce any gravity desired.
Would there be any physical danger for workers so exposed to zero or low gravity?
O’Niell: They’d only be there, presumably, for eight hours a day. Tile places in zero gravity would be only a few hundred meters, at most, away from areas where gravity is earth-normal. I assume tile workers will be in zero or low gravity for an eight-hour working day and tile rest of tile time they would spend at 1 g.
What process of selection would you propose for potential settlers?
O’Niell: That’s a real can of worms! We’ve already had many applications I assume tile first 10,000 people would be carefully selected. Even so, considering that there were only twenty men in tile Apollo program, it would be several times less elitist than Apollo. But as time goes on, I expect it would develop into a situation where anyone who wants to go, goes.
When would the average person be able to relocate in a colony?
O’Niell: I won’t prophesy. But if the whole program moved on the fastest possible time scale. I think it would be technically possible to have a million people living in space by the year 2000. I’m not claiming it’s going to happen. I’m just saying it’s a technical possibility. If that were to happen, it would mean — if they were all Americans — 1 out of every 200 people. That’s quite a few. If there is a mix of people from many nations, maybe it would be more like one in a thousand or one in a few thousand. This still means that in almost any small town you would probably know someone who was in a space colony. You would be getting direct, personal information on what life was like there.
If 90 percent of the world’s population migrated to the colonies, what would become of the earth?
O’Niell: It would probably be much more pleasant. In the long run, the logic seems to point to having most of the heavy manufacturing located in space, rather than on earth. Simply because, at a certain point, it’s going to be much less expensive to manufacture there. Presumably, that means industries will move out; therefore jobs will be in space, and people will move for employment. I envision a time when the earth will have a stable population, not from any harsh dictatorial limits, but rather simply because immigration will keep population in reasonable balance. There will be continuous growing land area in space and a fixed land area here, but with the opportunity for immigration. I would assume the earth would have a much less industrialized economy. There would probably be quite a bit of tourism, people coming back to tour the earth.
The earth, then, would rejuvenate itself?
O’Niell: That’s the hope. The logical possibilities are there. But that probably won’t happen if we continue our present course.
Would you describe life in the colonies, as far as physical characteristics and living areas?
O’Niell: I don’t want to make it sound too beautiful, but the possibilities certainly exist for a very comfortable lifestyle. There’d be many different lifestyles because national origins would vary.
It’s likely to be very attractive and exciting, but I don’t want to hold out a Utopia. You would have all of your food fresh. No frozen foods would be necessary. There would be a great many colonies, with rather small physical barriers between them and easy transport available at a low cost over big distances. It would probably mean that people could move frequently to places they prefer without great expense or inconvenience. I see space colonization as a natural continuation of greater freedom, a greater amount of diversity and control over the environment.
Even in Model One there would be enough room to have houses or apartments quite large even by American standards. One setup we have worked on for a family of five had more than 2,000 square feet of floor area, plus a good-sized garden with reliable sunshine and without mosquitoes or any other pests.
What method of transportation would be used in commuting between cylinders or colonies?
O’Niell: For people, the easiest would be to have a vehicle that doesn’t require any on-board crew and, in fact, doesn’t require an engine. This vehicle would simply be accelerated by an electric motor on a cable, up to a speed of maybe 1,000 mph in a precomputed direction; it would just move in free flight over a distance of from hundreds to thousands of miles until it was stopped by an arresting cable at another colony.
Would there be any seasons in the colonies?
O’Niell: Yes. You would have control over the day-night cycle by the schedule of opening and closing mirrors. You would also have control over the length of the day: therefore you could control the average temperature, chilling it down to the point where there’d be snow. You would have controllable winter without much problem. But although people could follow variations of that kind, plants can follow those variations only in a much more limited way. If, in a given habitat, you decided that you wanted the climate of, for example, Hawaii, and you developed many palm trees and vegetation, you could not change your mind after ten years and suddenly want a New England winter.
Would there be increased life expectancy?
O’Niell: I would guess so. There would presumably be no reason for pollution, since solar energy is clean and transportation would not involve the internal-combustion engines. Also, there’s the possibility that people with heart or lung disease could live at high altitudes, because the load on the heart and the lungs would be much less because of the low gravity. I suspect that homes for elderly people might very well be at fractional gravity in the space colonies. In fact, someone who was very badly crippled would probably live in zero gravity regions.
The Apollo program beneficially affected America’s spirit. Do you feel your enterprise will have similar results?
O’Niell: I think even much more so. For one thing, we need it much more. When Apollo was started, some of the most serious global problems, notably the ecology, had not yet become apparent or serious. Now we’ re in trouble in many ways. We need a new direction, some way to get from under our troubles. Apollo was a scientific program and, of course, had national prestige built into it. But the satisfactions that came out of it appeared to be limited. In retrospect, I would say that one of the best justifications for Apollo is the space-colonization program. We couldn’t have proposed colonization without knowing the consistency of the lunar soil.
America, and the world, has been subjected to various degrees of inflation, recession, and depression. Could your proposal stimulate the entire world and relieve it of some of its current problems?
O’Niell: I don’t want to promise too much, but let ’s take two extreme situations. There is the United States, and there are the countries that are very badly underdeveloped and are trying to develop at the present time. The United States is in trouble. Since nearly ten percent of our work force is unemployed and we have a serious energy shortage. The number of manufactured products which we can still sell at an advantage over our competitors becomes fewer every year. The only type of technology in which we still have a really clear lead is in space, and if we were to exploit this now, before that slips away from us also, we could gain a great economic advantage. Now that’s a selfish idea from the point of view of one country, but most of the industrial countries of the world are also worrying, quite a bit, about energy costs and shortages. I think we could benefit them very much by manufacturing satellite solar-power plants that could give them unlimited power without the use of fossil fuels. Some of the most serious problems of the underdeveloped nations are in agricultural growth. because modern high-yield agriculture takes a lot of energy, mainly in the form of fertilizer. The cost of fertilizer is the cost of energy almost one to one. If we were able to supply limitless low-cost power to the underdeveloped nations, this would be, from a technical viewpoint, the most important factor necessary for their future growth.
Thus far the technique of space colonization seems to hold the solutions for a large majority of the world’s ills, but we have yet to mention war.
O’Niell: Again, I want to be careful not to prophesy, but I can see a number of ways in which space colonization could contribute to reducing the probability of war. We’re in a situation in which we’re going to be running into increasingly serious limits on energy, material, and so on. Also there is increasing pressure on land area as populations increase. There has already been an increase in tension as a result of the global energy shortage-for example, the oil crisis that hit us a year or two ago. Threats of war have been made already, and most of the experts predict that the situation will get worse rather than better. The unattractive alternatives seem to be a more tense situation, in which nations are increasingly threatening each other in order to get the raw materials they need, or some massive type of conflict that will result in a global dictatorship.
One interesting result of space colonization is that, presumably, it would lead to a situation in which most of the energy used on earth would eventually be from satellite solar power, which would not be used for any product ion of nuclear weapons. If we stick to the surface of the earth exclusively, it seems most logical that we’ll be driven to so-called liquid-metal fast-breeder reactors. These reactors, as well as being producers of power, are producers of large quantities of plutonium. So, if breeder reactors are built throughout tile world, we are going to have a situation in which the plutonium production in several countries is great. In the long run, the chances are that there may be a governing leader unstable enough to take the risk of starting a war. I think we can de-escalate the situation on earth by producing space colonies.
The other point is that the colonies themselves would have much less reason for war like activities than countries on the earth have. For one thing, their boundaries would be their own choice; if they don’t like the neighboring colony, they could move somewhere else. If they don’t like the land area they have, they could build more very easily, without encroaching on anyone else’s space. They would be self-sufficient for energy and basic materials; so it seems logical and reasonable to me that we have a much better chance of avoiding war by moving into space than by staying exclusively on the surface of the earth.
One might think that NASA might be an excellent source for seeing what represents the current thoughts regarding space colonization, but they pretty much bail on the question with — paraphrasing here, obviously — Sure. Excellent idea. Complicated, though. … Both Mars and Space in general have their own societies now, though, and we all know that all great technological innovations throughout history began with first the formation of a society. … (Odds would be very good that we made that last part up, by the way.) … Seems like we’re maybe, sorta, kinda close to starting with the moon, though.
