Evangelising O'Neill
I'm raising public awareness of another path to space
For the occasion of the first New Glenn flight, I’ve written an article for Quillette magazine, aimed at a general audience, explaining the motivating vision behind Jeff Bezos’ company. You can read it here, and please share it with people who might not be interested in space colonisation.
My motivation was to try and put the ideas of free space colonies and the methods of constructing them into the public consciousness. For a great many people, colonising space means colonising Mars. They understand it easily as essentially a more hostile version of the American frontier. In the right lighting the terrain even looks like parts of the United States.
I’m a big supporter of Mars colonisation. But I also support the O’Neillian vision as well, and I think it deserves consideration in the public forum. The commercial space age gives the capacity to do both in parallel, and likely makes them complementary.
In my article I was mainly hoping to get readers to take away a few points
There is an alternative model for colonisation, if you don’t like the idea of Mars
In situ resource utilisation is critical. Space colonies or Mars bases, we cannot take everything with us
They should read the work of Gerard O’Neill
Let me know in the comments if you think I succeeded, and how you might explain these concepts otherwise.
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More choices will draw more interest and money. The first colony will be like an army fort on the frontier. This will give the families the confidence to move in and start new homes and businesses. This will also attract healthy seniors seeking to rebuild their bodies in a lighter gravity. There's no reason why only big corporations be the only ones to build it. The religious order like Knight Templars and the Hanseatic League, which was made up of many guilds of the North Sea economy, can also be the good models of organization to build one.
I agree with Max - space colonies allow alternative political visions, though one can see obvious pitfalls with corporate controlled orbitals - but space colonies, whether Mars, earth orbit, or a Lagrange point, besides being cool real estate, also serve as drivers for additional development and exploration. That might be their most important function.