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Description
An O'Neill Cylinder is a remarkably inefficient habitat. A Stanford Torus or Bernal Sphere is easier to build, a McKendree Cylinder has better rotational stability in the long term, a beehive-tunnelled asteroid provides more elemental resources, a Millennial Project Asgard-sphere has better nested redundancies... and that's without even getting into practical issues such as the thermal stresses on the giant windows.

But when faced with a universe that doesn't provide even a single habitable planet with green-skinned Martian space-girls, or Venusian jungle amazonian catgirls, there's a certain something to be said for shouting out into the void, "I'm going to make my /own/ world, with whatever atmosphere and gravity and ecology I darn well feel like having!".

Even once Earth-bound solar panels and other renewables get cheap enough that there's no obvious cost benefit in building solar-power satellites, they can still be used to expand the energy supply to a world with data-centres full of uploaded minds, limited as much by how much electricity is available as by how quickly silicon crystals can be turned into chips. Plus, of course, asteroid mining can provide enough riches to incentivize all sorts of capitalists, while also dropping the prices of a number of materials far enough to make all sorts of crazy new manufacturing methods feasible. (Gold-plated everything!) And once enough political reforms have passed to reduce the amount of national budget skimmed off by kleptocrats to a sane level, the savings would more than pay for increasing space programs' budgets to what people think is already being spent on space, and then some. Voters /like/ space programs, after all.

All of which is, of course, merely my hand-waving attempts to come up with background justification for why something I'd like to see just might come to pass. We could all do with a few more dreams of a better future, and a little more hope, these days.

Picture by MKaz ( www.furaffinity.net/user/mkaz/ ). Background photo credit goes to NASA Ames Research Center.

(Intro , Details , 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 )

Description
An O'Neill Cylinder is a remarkably inefficient habitat. A Stanford Torus or Bernal Sphere is easier to build, a McKendree Cylinder has better rotational stability in the long term, a beehive-tunnelled asteroid provides more elemental resources, a Millennial Project Asgard-sphere has better nested redundancies... and that's without even getting into practical issues such as the thermal stresses on the giant windows.

But when faced with a universe that doesn't provide even a single habitable planet with green-skinned Martian space-girls, or Venusian jungle amazonian catgirls, there's a certain something to be said for shouting out into the void, "I'm going to make my /own/ world, with whatever atmosphere and gravity and ecology I darn well feel like having!".

Even once Earth-bound solar panels and other renewables get cheap enough that there's no obvious cost benefit in building solar-power satellites, they can still be used to expand the energy supply to a world with data-centres full of uploaded minds, limited as much by how much electricity is available as by how quickly silicon crystals can be turned into chips. Plus, of course, asteroid mining can provide enough riches to incentivize all sorts of capitalists, while also dropping the prices of a number of materials far enough to make all sorts of crazy new manufacturing methods feasible. (Gold-plated everything!) And once enough political reforms have passed to reduce the amount of national budget skimmed off by kleptocrats to a sane level, the savings would more than pay for increasing space programs' budgets to what people think is already being spent on space, and then some. Voters /like/ space programs, after all.

All of which is, of course, merely my hand-waving attempts to come up with background justification for why something I'd like to see just might come to pass. We could all do with a few more dreams of a better future, and a little more hope, these days.

Picture by MKaz ( www.furaffinity.net/user/mkaz/ ). Background photo credit goes to NASA Ames Research Center.

(Intro , Details , 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 )