Living in outer space
Back to the future
Jeff Bezos's ambition to colonise space is straight from the 1970s
IT WAS MORE interesting than another quarterly business update. On May 9th Jeff Bezos, the boss of
Amazon, had his coming-out party as a space cadet.Mr Bezos, who is the world's richest man, has
long been interested in using his fortune to advance the cause of space flight. His private
rocketry firm, Blue Origin, was founded in 2000. But he has been less of a publicity seeker than
Elon Musk, the founder of SpaceX and the world's best-known enthusiast for outer space.
No longer. During an hour-long presentation, Mr Bezos introduced Blue Origin's prototype lunar
lander, a machine that could be ready, he said, to meet America’s ambitions to return to the Moon
by 2024. More striking were his plans for the farther future. Mr Musk wants humans to colonise Mars
as an insurance policy should anything happen to Earth. Mr Bezos has no interest in Mars, or indeed
any other planet in the solar system, all of which (except Earth) are pretty inhospitable places.
Instead, he thinks humans should build their new space-going homes from scratch.
The idea is not new. Mr Bezos studied at Princeton, and one of his professors was Gerard O'Neill,
a physicist. In 1976 O'Neill published "The High Frontier", a bestselling book in which he sketched
out the basic engineering principles of how such space habitats might work. It was exactly those
sorts of habitat that Mr Bezos advocated as the way humans would live in the future.
O’Neill’s book offered three shapes: a cylinder, a pair of cylinders or a torus. All are hollow,
with the living surface built on the inside. All rotate, with the centrifugal force felt at the
walls standing in for gravity. Sunlight provides both energy—through solar panels—and
illumination, thanks to a system of mirrors and windows. And all are on a heroic scale. The
biggest are tens of kilometres long and have enough living room for millions of people.
Florentine renaissance
For that reason, they would have to be built by a species that had already mastered space travel,
using resources harvested from the asteroid belt (like Mr Musk, Mr Bezos hopes to drive down the
cost of space flight as a first step). They would be strange places to live. The land would
curve visibly up the sides of the structure. The superstructure of the habitat would arch across
the "sky". And rotation is not a perfect substitute for gravity, so moving objects would behave
oddly, particularly if the habitat were small. But, said Mr Bezos, they also offer several
advantages. Climates could be engineered (“Maui on its best day, all year long”). The best bits
of Earth could be replicated elsewhere (one of his illustrations, shown above, depicted a
space-going version of Florence).
Their biggest advantage, though, is the sheer amount of living space they would create. Mr Bezos's
ultimate justification for pursuing such megaprojects is his worry about the mismatch between the
exponential process of population growth and the finiteness of Earth's resources. He gave the
example of energy demand, which, he says, has historically grown by around 3% a year. He argues
that if this were to continue, Earth would, in a couple of centuries, need to be covered
completely by solar panels. With the resources of the solar system at its command, however,
and thousands of habitats scattered through space, the human population could comfortably grow
to a trillion or more.
Perhaps. It is notable that Mr Bezos’s justifications come from the same era as his proposed
solutions. It is a mathematical truism that exponential growth will eventually overwhelm any fixed,
finite quantity. Such arguments were most famously applied to natural resources in
"The Limits to Growth", published by the Club of Rome in 1972. Not so much a bold new future,
then, but a blast from the past.