One afternoon in Washington, D.C., a man delivered a high-stakes presentation about the future of humans in outer space. We would need to go and live there, he told his audience, because the expansion of human life beyond Earth was the only alternative to stagnation and stasis.
It was a turbulent time: Cultural change had seemed to slow down, and people were newly aware that resources on Earth were shrinking, while pollution and environmental destruction were growing. If our horizons didn’t expand, the man warned, they might end up limited forever.
His plan to change these trends started with an outpost on the Moon. There, a small number of people could begin a mining operation that would support the next phase—the construction of large-scale, rotating habitats in orbit that would contain reconstructions of Earth’s cities and landscapes, becoming home to millions.
This presentation took place in the summer of 1975, when Princeton physicist Gerard O’Neill (1927-1992) briefed Congress about a plan he was working on with NASA. The description of O’Neill’s presentation, though, could apply note for note to a talk that Amazon founder Jeff Bezos gave on May 9 in D.C., unveiling his spaceflight company Blue Origin’s design for a lunar lander and a longer-term vision of space habitats. Some of the technology and the people have changed (Bezos’s talk was live-tweeted), but the overall goals, methods, and rationale for moving to space have remained the same.
With so many similarities evident between these two visions, it’s worth asking: Have we really learned anything in the past 50 years about how to plan for a better human future?
O’Neill’s project began in 1969. Despite the success of the Apollo moon landing, his physics students at Princeton were becoming disillusioned about the prospects of engineering to change the world for the better. The Vietnam War was dragging on, and persistent social and racial inequality made technology seem inadequate to address political change. O’Neill asked an advanced group of students to study a direct question: “Is the surface of a planet really the right place for an expanding technological civilization?”
The “O’Neill colonies” that he designed in response to this question, first with his students, and later with teams of architects, planners, engineers, and artists, were huge cylinders, spheres, and toruses with new surfaces for new kinds of civilizations inside. O’Neill’s book about this work, The High Frontier, was read by millions and has remained in print almost continuously.
Jeff Bezos was one of Gerard O’Neill’s students at Princeton in the mid-1980s. By then, cultural interest, and NASA funding, for O’Neill’s ideas had peaked. Gerard O’Neill had pitched his huge habitats as the solution for overpopulation, industrial pollution, ecosystem extinction, the energy crisis, and the culture wars. But in the era of Reagan and Thatcher, economic expansion on Earth’s surface—without any thought for consequences—seemed to be back on the menu. Meanwhile, the appetite for large-scale public expenditures had soured.