The Science, Health, and Technology Room
I think this will happen sooner rather than later. The person / company that does it will make the first trillionaire(s).
Humans could move to this floating asteroid belt colony in the next 15 years, astrophysicist says
Now more than ever, space agencies and starry-eyed billionaires have their minds fixed on finding a new home for humanity beyond Earth's orbit. Mars is an obvious candidate, given its relatively close proximity, 24-hour day/night cycle and CO2-rich atmosphere. However, there's a school of spacefaring thought that suggests colonizing the surface of another planet — any planet — is more trouble than it's worth.
Now, a new paper published Jan. 6 date to the preprint database arXiv offers a creative counter-proposal: Ditch the Red Planet, and build a gargantuan floating habitat around the dwarf planet Ceres, instead.
In the paper, which has not yet been peer-reviewed, astrophysicist Pekka Janhunen of the Finnish Meteorological Institute in Helsinki describes his vision of a "megasatellite" of thousands of cylindrical spacecrafts, all linked together inside a disk-shaped frame that permanently orbits Ceres — the largest object in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. Each of these cylindrical habitats could accommodate upwards of 50,000 people, support an artificial atmosphere and generate an Earth-like gravity through the centrifugal force of its own rotation, Janhunen wrote. (This general idea, first proposed in the 1970s, is known as an O'Neill cylinder).
But why Ceres? Its average distance from Earth is comparable to that of Mars, Janhunen wrote, making travel relatively easy — but the dwarf planet also has a big elemental advantage. Ceres is rich in nitrogen, which would be crucial in developing the orbiting settlement's atmosphere, Janhunen said (Earth's atmosphere is roughly 79% nitrogen.) Rather than building a colony on the surface of the tiny world — Ceres has a radius roughly 1/13th that of Earth — settlers could utilize space elevators to transfer raw materials from the planet directly up to their orbiting habitats.
This orbital lifestyle would also address one of the biggest caveats Janhunen sees in the idea of a Martian surface colony: the health impacts of low gravity.
"My concern is that children on a Mars settlement would not develop to healthy adults (in terms of muscles and bones) due to the too-low Martian gravity," Janhunen told Live Science in an email. "Therefore, I searched for [an] alternative that would provide [Earth-like] gravity but also an interconnected world."
Even so, Janhunen's proposal comes with its own caveats that could work against a successful Ceres colony, an outside researcher pointed out.Read the rest at the link.According to Janhunen's proposal, each cylinder of the Ceres megasatellite would produce its own gravity through rotation; each cylindrical habitat would measure about 6.2 miles (10 kilometers) long, have a radius of 0.6 miles (1 km) and complete a full rotation every 66 seconds to generate the centrifugal force needed to simulate Earth-like gravity.
A single cylinder could comfortably hold about 57,000 people, Janhunen said, and would be held in place next to its neighboring cylinders through powerful magnets, like those used in magnetic levitation.
That interconnectedness points to the other big advantage of megasatellite living, Janhunen said: New habitat cylinders could be added onto the edges of the colony indefinitely, allowing for near unlimited expansion.
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Originally Posted by Peter1469
