![]() Now, notice that I said that this would be inevitable and certain. But with all of that said, once you've got those orbital rings built, you'll be sending a lot of stuff to space and you'd have a lot of extra buildings and cities to keep all that stuff.īut what would we humans do after that? It turns out that the answer would be to, inevitably and certainly, go on to colonize the entire solar system, and then the entire Milky Way galaxy, and then other galaxies as well-though, in this article, we'll be primarily focused with how orbital rings would be used to colonize the solar system. These would be the O'Neil cylinders-though, for aesthetic and visual purposes, most images portray O'Neil cylinders which are not surrounded by asteroids. Indeed, we discussed in a previous article entitled, Colonizing the Asteroids and Comets of our Solar System, how these objects could be hollowed out and then, after hollowing them out, we could build rotating cylindrical habitats inside of them. But a mass driver could also be used as a propulsion system to move asteroids to locations near the Earth where they could be subsequently mined for there resources. A mass driver is a kind of launch system and rail gun which would allow us to launch lunar materials into space where they could be used to build stuff like orbital rings and O'Neil cylinders in space. O'Neil wanted to build a mass driver on the Moon exactly for this purpose. O'Neil, we could build O'Neil cylinders (and the orbital ring and other megastructures) using materials from the Moon and asteroids. As originally outlined by the physicist Gerard K. To conclude what has been discussed up to this point: today, going to space is expensive, and thus not many people or cargo go there in the future, with an orbital ring, going to space would be cheap, and thus you'd have a lot of people and cargo going there because you'd have a lot more people and "stuff" going there, you'd need to build more living spaces and facilities up there (which is where the Standford torus, Bernal sphere, and/or O'Neil cylinder could come into play).Īlso-and this is a slight tangent-but this would give us another good reason to go back to the Moon. But we'd have so many people going to space that it would also make sense to build things like the O'Neil cylinder, a type of megastructure which can accommodate up to several million people. Those living areas and facilities could be megastructures like the Standford torus or the Bernal sphere those megastructures could accommodate up to 10,000 people each. With all of those people and cargo going to space, you would need to build a lot of new living space and facilities up there. ![]() This would cause quite the boom in the space tourism industry.įor the first time in our species history, millions and eventually billions of us would be commuting between Earth and space every year due to the ultra-low cost to go to space. If we had an orbital ring, we could send people to space for a cost comparable to that of a plane ticket. But with an orbital ring, all of that changes. Indeed, in the year 2021, a 12-day stay in a space hotel might cost $9.5 million. ![]() Today, it is very expensive to go to space this is because, with present methods, we must use big bulky rockets that consume a lot of fuel to get something to space. We'll learn that orbital rings are the prelude to space and the complete colonization of our solar system in particular. Basically, an orbital ring is just a giant ring that would surround our planet. Today, we're going to learn about orbital rings. ![]()
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