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Mar

2018

Humans in ‘space cities’ orbiting Earth by 2100: Al Globus

Dr Al Globus, a contractor for the Nasa Ames Research Centre in California, says humanity could soon begin to build space settlements. A space settlement would be a large structure like a town or city that would house hundreds or thousands of people.

Popular concepts for them involve large rotating structures
These would have artificial gravity on the parts that are rotating
Dr Globus tells MailOnline such a structure could feasible be built by the end of the century, if major national disasters are avoided
But he explains how a number of key steps need to be achieved first before large orbiting cities can be built
And he envisages that once we have colonised Earth orbit, it will not be too long before we explore the solar system and beyond as well

By Jonathan O’Callaghan for MailOnline

Humans are now spread across all corners of the globe, but what’s the next step?

According to Dr Al Globus, a Nasa contractor and space settlement expert, he says the next logical move is to colonise Earth orbit.

And, he says barring any major national disasters, we could soon have huge habitats floating around the planet by the end of the century.

Dr Al Globus, a contractor for the Nasa Ames Research Centre in California, says humanity could soon begin to build space settlements. A space settlement (artist’s illustration) would be a large structure like a town or city that would house hundreds or thousands of people

Dr Globus is a contract scientist at Nasa Ames research centre and over the years has worked on the Hubble Space Telescope, the ISS, the Space Shuttle and much more.

But a few decades ago his interest was piqued by the possibility of space settlements, leading to him setting up Nasa’s annual Space Settlement Contest, which challenges students to come up with designs for space colonies.

Now he’s a major proponent for living in space, and believes that it won’t be long before people are visiting cities in Earth orbit as readily as they travel from London to New York.

WHAT IS A SPACE SETTLEMENT?

A space settlement would be a large structure, comparable in size to a town or small city, built in Earth orbit. It would have similar amenities and services to towns and cities on Earth, and would enable people to live in space The ISS currently houses six astronauts at a time, but a space settlement would have hundreds or thousands of people on board. Future space settlements may also have artificial gravity by rotating around an axis. Whether [space settlements] will happen or not is really hard to say. Whether it can happen, absolutely.” Dr Globus tells MailOnline.

“If we as a people decide to do it, we can do it. We have the scientific capability, financial capability, there is simply no question we can do it. If no major disaster strikes in the next few centuries, I would be astounded if we didn’t do it.” He explains how our technological know-how it only going to increase barring an enormous catastrophe like a nuclear war. “We could have the first space settlement in decades, certainly less than a century.”

Dr Globus (pictured) is a contract scientist at Nasa Ames research centre and over the years has worked on the Hubble Space Telescope, the ISS, the Space Shuttle and much more. He now also runs an annual competition called the Space Settlement Contest

Dr Globus is a proponent of orbiting colonies, while he adds that others like SpaceX CEO Elon Musk are envisaging a future where humans live on Mars.

As to the actual purpose of a space settlement Dr Globus says it could be just like a town or city on Earth while also providing a way for humans to expand and survive off Earth.

It would be ‘a place to live, raise your kids, where your friends and family have Thanksgiving dinner and celebrate Christmas, and visit Earth on vacation,’ explains Dr Globus.

“It’s the same purpose as any town or settlement or city has. The way species get endangered and wiped out is by being dependent on a limited environment. Humanity started in East Africa and now live on literally every continent – even Antarctica – albeit for a small time. We live in snow, jungle, deserts, savannahas, forests; we have spread out about as far as we can spread out, and the next step is to move to space.”

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk (left) has been building and launching rockets with the goal of making access to space easier. He hopes that one day humans may be able to colonise Mars (right). Dr Globus says such a goal is achievable, after perhaps building a colony in Earth orbit

But what would that first space settlement look like? Many designs rely upon a central cylinder around which is a rotating habitat. In the rotating section the force of rotation provides artificial gravity for the inhabitants, letting the move around like they would on Earth.

‘That means your children will grow up with strong muscles.” explains Dr Globus, so even if they spend a prolonged time in space they could still travel to Earth and cope with its gravity.

At the centre of the structure though there would be zero-gravity, as there would be no rotation here. This, explains Dr Globus, could be used for recreation or even to film movies. Elsewhere on the station would be agriculture, while the outer hull would need to be partially covered in solar cells.

But what would that first space settlement look like? Many designs rely upon a central cylinder around which is a rotating habitat (artist’s illustration shown). In the rotating section the force of rotation provides artificial gravity for the inhabitants, letting the move around like they would on Earth

But Dr Globus admits that such an undertaking is something that just isn’t financially feasible – for now.

THE CHALLENGES OF BUILDING A SPACE SETTLEMENT

According to Dr Globus there are a number of obstacles that must be overcome before humans can live in space.

The first is that the cost of getting to space via rockets must decrease.

Next is life support; a future space colony will need to be almost self-sufficient, using indoor farms and solar energy. A colony will also need radiation shielding to protect it from harmful cosmic and solar rays, although recent research says this may not be a big issue.

“If you have to ask [how much it would cost], you can’t afford it. There is one circumstance we could easily afford it, and that’s if the people of Earth decided to stop killing each other and spend all that time and money on space settlements.’

However starting to build a space settlement now is not a good idea, he says, as technology and infrastructure are not yet sufficient. He says we need to progress through several hoops before settling in space can become a viable option. One of these is space tourism. Several private companies such as Boeing and SpaceX are busy building manned spacecraft, while others like Bigelow Aerospace are planning to build ‘space hotels’ in orbit. These orbiting habitats, while much smaller than the large space settlements envisaged by Dr Globus, would allow people to pay for trips to space.

Dr Globus even says these could be used to raise money by hosting what he calls a ‘Space Olympics’ in orbit.

By sending the world’s top athletes to space and having the compete, people would tune in to watch them compete in a variety of micro-gravity sports.

‘You could get Usain Bolt, a soccer star, a basketball star and so on,’ he says.

‘It would be a level playing field because no one knows how to do sports in microgravity. So that would totally be entertaining.’

Dr Globus says we need to progress through several hoops before settling in space can really be a viable option. One of these is space tourism. Several private companies such as Boeing and SpaceX are busy building manned spacecraft, while others like Bigelow Aerospace are planning to build ‘space hotels’ (concepts shown)

The timeline for all this is of course up for debate, but Dr Globus is confident it will happen sooner or later.

‘In two or three decades we might have a couple of small hotels [in orbit], and people moving in on a regular basis,’ he says.

‘Then at some point somebody will notice if you are old and infirm you might like to live on a space hotel, because you wouldn’t be subjected to a 1G hotel and you wouldn’t need a walker or wheelchair.

‘I can foresee someone building a retirement home in low gravity; after a couple of years you won’t be able to come back, but if you’re facing 15 years of sitting in a wheelchair you might not want to do that anyway.

‘And once that step is done, people living in space permanently, then it’s not a big step to build a space settlement in orbit.

‘All that is on a time scale measured in decades, or in the worst case centuries.’

And living in space doesn’t need to stop there. Once a large, floating colony has been built, Dr Globus explains that other locations in the solar system can be explored.

Perhaps, using asteroids for additional material, a space settlement could be placed around the Martian moons Phobos and Deimos.

Once humans have settled in Earth orbit, Dr Globus says it is not a huge leap to imagine they will want to eventually travel further. This could begin with the solar system in a few millennia and, ultimately, expand further into the Milky Way

‘I can imagine within a few centuries that the first settlement will be co-orbiting an asteroid,’ says Dr Globus.

‘To really settle the solar system will take millennia, maybe longer.’

And once that goal has achieved, Dr Globus says there is not much to stop us expanding into the rest of galaxy.

‘Imagine you have been living on orbital space settlements for 10,000 years,’ he says.

‘In your settlement there might be 100,000 people or even millions.

‘If people decided to go to Alpha Centauri, even thought it may take a century to get there, it doesn’t matter, because you’ve been living in this settlement for thousands of years anyway.

‘In terms of living situations, does it really matter if you circle Earth or Alpha Centauri? Not really.’

Mar

2018

How do you build a city in space?

It’s a hell of a town … an artistic rendering by Rick Guidice of a toroidal space colony studied by Nasa in the 1970s. Illustration: Nasa Ames Research Center. Now after swinging budget cuts at Nasa, a loose agglomeration of private companies – including Elon Musk’s SpaceX – have revived the dormant dream of colonising other worlds

Jessa Gamble

Science fiction has delivered on many of its promises. Star Trek videophones have become Skype, the Jetsons’ food-on-demand is materialising through 3-D printing, and we have done Jules Verne one better and explored mid-ocean trenches at crushing depths. But the central promise of golden age sci-fi has not yet been kept. Humans have not colonised space.

For a brief moment in the 1970s, the grandeur of the night sky felt interactive. It seemed only decades away that more humans would live off the Earth than on it; in fact, the Space Shuttle was so named because it was intended to make 50 round trips per year. There were active plans for expanding civilisation into space, and any number of serious designs for building entire cities on the moon, Mars and beyond.

The space age proved to be a false dawn, of course. After a sobering interlude, children who had sat rapt at the sight of the moon landings grew up, and accepted that terraforming space – once briefly assumed to be easy – was actually really, really hard. Intense cold war motivation flagged, and the Challenger and Columbia disasters taught us humility. Nasa budgets sagged from 5% of the US federal budget to less than 0.5%. People even began to doubt that we’d ever set foot on the moon: in a 2006 poll, more than one in four Americans between 18 and 25 said they suspected the moon landing was a hoax.

But now a countercurrent has surfaced. The children of Apollo, educated and entrepreneurial, are making real headway on some of the biggest difficulties. Large-scale settlement, as opposed to drab old scientific exploration, is back on the menu.

Space cities come in three basic models. The classic one is to terraform a nearby Earth-like object, by using massive geo-engineering projects or bio-domes to create a lunar or Martian metropolis. The second is the low-Earth orbit model: this expands upon the currently inhabited region of space. Think of the International Space Station as a government fort, around which commercial trading posts, homesteads and finally urban areas develop. Then there is the free space model, basically floating cylinders with artificial gravity, surviving by digesting the natural resources of outer space. As the saying goes in the space community: once you’re out of Earth’s gravity well, you’re halfway to anywhere.

In the 1970s, Princeton physicist Gerald K O’Neill envisioned 100,000-person colonies, stationed at what is known as the fifth Lagrangian libration point (L5) in the moon’s orbit – like a gravitational eddy where things stay put by themselves. Encouraged by fellow physicists Freeman Dyson and Richard Feynman, he posited a “planar cluster” housing four billion people across 30,000km of space. “It is orthodox to believe that Earth is the only practical habitat for Man,” he wrote in Physics Today in 1974, but we can “build new habitats far more comfortable, productive and attractive than is most of Earth.” O’Neill called the classic model of colonising planets proper a “mental hang-up”, and suggested it lacked imagination for the possibilities of open space.

In O’Neill’s vision, cable cars would connect communities spaced at 200km intervals. Single-family spacecraft – the minivans of the sky – would act as recreational vehicles. On the inner surface of what would be rotating habitats, strips of land would alternate with windows to let in sunlight. That same sun would provide all of our energy needs (a much bolder statement in the 70s than it is now), while the moon would be mined for aluminum and titanium to use in habitat construction. Asteroids, containing water and other material, could be towed along behind the city in the vacuum. His idea to build such cities in the moon’s L5 orbital point inspired the influential L5 Society, which aimed to realise his vision by 1995. Their motto: L5 in ’95!

O’Neill’s dream did not come to pass – not because it was inherently flawed, but because it was an idea before its time. Spaceflight infrastructure was in its infancy, and costs were prohibitive. We simply didn’t know enough of the basics to jump straight into urban design.

The central challenge to building a city in space is to create a closed system that can sustain itself for the long haul. Urban areas on Earth survive only by relying on a much larger footprint than their metropolitan boundaries. The more isolated a space city is – the farther from external resupply resources – the more closed its oxygen, food and water loops must be. The ISS, for example, has about 40% efficiency in its oxygen recycling, and even so its ambient CO2 levels are perpetually high. (Nasa is working on how to convert that CO2 directly into oxygen.) As for food, any space-based urban plan would require rolling out high-yield agriculture on an unprecedented scale – though 3D printers could, given some fresh ingredients, print a pizza.

The other big problem for a space city is how humans would function physiologically. The neighborhood gym would be a popular destination: though the human species is ill-suited for some aspects of deep space, 14 years of continuous presence on the ISS have advanced our understanding of how to adapt physically for a lifetime among the stars. Early astronauts paid for this knowledge the hard way, as it were, with their bone density. Today’s ISS crew train for 2.5 hours a day on a jury-rigged zero-gravity exercise contraption in order to keep their bone density at normal levels. Still, with longer stays in zero gravity, new problems seem to crop up. For example, your cerebrospinal fluid – the clear liquid found in the brain and spine – drifts upward, where it engorges your retina and flattens your eyeball. “I lost two diopters in my eyes,” recalls former astronaut Michael López-Alegría, who spent 215 consecutive days on the ISS. “It’s also pretty easy to get something in your eye up there. You just walk into something.”

City walls would be required to shield space citizens from the brutal radiation bombardment of deep space. “Aluminum shielding can actually be part of the problem,” says Vince Michaud, Nasa’s deputy chief health and medical officer. “Radiation that makes it through takes some of the aluminum with it.” Nasa spends $28m every year in radiation research alone, including pharmaceutical and nutriceutical countermeasures and magnetic shielding. Bill Paloski, director of Nasa’s Space Life and Physical Sciences division, believes that by 2024 his team will be able to mitigate the health risks of space.

As for actually getting people to the space cities in the first place, it won’t be using rockets – basic physics doesn’t cooperate. Rather, space elevators, or “beanstalks”, promise to close that gap. Vehicles would climb out of the gravity well along a cable anchored to the equator and held under tension by centrifugal force on a counterweight tens of thousands of kilometers high. Until now, materials science hadn’t produced the kind of tensile strength required for a space elevator cable – even carbon nanotubes are too weak by themselves – but in 2010 the Nobel prize in physics was awarded for experiments on graphene. A one-atom sheet of pure carbon that is 100 times stronger than steel, graphene is a promising candidate for space elevator cable material.

“We can colonise the moon, Mars … wherever people want, really,” SpaceX chief executive Elon Musk (of Tesla Motors fame) told documentary-makers on the film Orphans of Apollo. “I think Mars is the logical place to go.” Musk’s company, specialists in space transport, are one of the most serious around; none of this conversation would be happening without SpaceX, and Musk is not alone in thinking of colonising Mars first. But though it may be easier to generate excitement around the Red Planet, insofar as the moon feels like an achievement already under our belts, several characteristics make Mars harder to colonise.

Martian gravity is three-eighths that of Earth, making landings more hazardous than in the moon’s one-sixth gravity. On the Apollo missions, lunar dust got everywhere – the crews inhaled it and got it in their eyes, and it wreaked mechanical havoc – and on Mars the dust is even more problematic, because it is highly oxidised, chemically reactive, electrically charged and windblown. Mars’s chlorinated soils would be toxic, for example, to the human thyroid gland.

There was some early speculation that a space city could be buried under the Martian surface to protect its inhabitants from radiation. Pamela Conrad, an astrobiologist with Mars Science Laboratory, contends that we would be digging from a rock into a hard place. “Trying to drill down to shield from ionising radiation might be okay for bacteria, but materials in the core are radiating, too,” she warns.

A lunar city, on the other hand, has the advantage of being up to a thousand times closer – practically next door – and as such could participate in Earth’s economy to some extent. Possible anchor industries could include space tourism and titanium mining, as well as pharmaceutical factories that require microgravity. The moonis also rich in helium 3, which is rare on Earth and thought to be a potential fuel source for future fusion reactors.

And industry is very much at the top of the agenda. Today the biggest space operation in the world is neither Nasa’s nor that of the US defense department, but DirecTV, valued at more than $48bn. Low-Earth orbit is quickly becoming the realm of the private sector – including the loose agglomeration of companies known collectively as NewSpace, which have shaken human spaceflight progress out of a sluggish period. Using the window created by the withdrawal of public funds from space programmes, NewSpace has fostered trust with government and increasingly enjoys the blessing of the US State Department, which controls export permits for objects being launched into orbit. Public sector clients like Nasa and the Air Force Space Command purchase equipment and supplies, and depend on the ingenuity and dexterity of the market. Indeed, Nasa has an $800m program to develop the commercial space market. Costs have come down dramatically as a result.

One figure in NewSpace taking advantage of this new flexibility is hotel tycoon Robert Bigelow. In 2015, the owner of Budget Suites of America will use a SpaceX rocket to send one of his inflatable space habitat modules up for testing at the ISS. These ingenious blow-up houses are capable of operating independently as space stations, and Bigelow wants to lease them as hotel suites (no surprise there), laboratories or for whatever else you might want. Nasa, having no current plans of their own for a moon mission, have given their blessing to Bigelow to use similar inflatable modules to build a lunar base.

If he doesn’t get there soon, the Chinese may beat him to it. Whereas Russia has been integrated into the global space community fairly effectively since the end of the cold war, China does not partner with the other big players. Instead, it plays its own game: in December of last year, as part of the country’s 12th Five-Year Plan, China’s lunar rover Chang’e 3 made the first soft landing the moon has seen since 1976. China is somewhat secretive about its space progress, but among its stated goals is to establish a crewed lunar base.

Rick Tumlinson is head of the asteroid mining company Deep Space Industries, which aims to be the gas station, building-supply centre and the air-and-water provider for space settlements. In the 1970s, a young Tumlinson worked at the Princeton Space Studies Institute, where he came under the influence of Gerard O’Neill and science fiction author Arthur C Clark (known to them as “Uncle Arthur”). He even led the New York chapter of the L5 Society. Deep Space is playing the long game out of a commitment he says he made in 1986 with several NewSpace entrepreneurs. According to Tumlinson, they pledged their lives and fortunes to “making the human breakout into space happen in our lifetimes”.

Tumlinson was one of a group that leased the Mir Space Station commercially from the Russian government for a few months in 1999. Calling it MirCorp, they gave their venture a countercultural, tongue-in-cheek personality, and sent up a Jolly Roger flag with the first commercial cosmonauts. Nasa and the State Department were not amused. They placed heavy pressure on the Russians to de-orbit Mir in order to focus on the ISS, then under construction. The current crop of space entrepreneurs, like Musk and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, watched Mir’s firey re-entry and breakup in 2001. They have learned from this and dedicate a lot of effort toward diplomacy and government cooperation.

Speaking at the Humans to Mars conference in Washington last month, Nasa chief Charles Bolden laid out a vision for bringing the US space programme out of its first stage, exploration, and into pioneering, even homesteading. “We are, right now, an Earth-reliant species,” he said. “But only multi-planet species survive for a long period of time.” Nasa plans to start with an asteroid capture and redirect by 2025, then pick up skills in the proving ground near Earth before venturing to a destination a thousand times farther than the moon. When humans get to Mars in the 2030s (the much-mocked Mars One group aims for the rather optimistic goal of a proper human settlement by 2024, or 10 years from now), the implication is that we will be there to stay.

If large-scale space settlement still sounds a little crazy, consider that from the passing of the Space Settlement Act 1988 until its quiet demise in the Paperwork Reduction Act of 1995, establishing extraterrestrial civilisation was the official goal of the US in space. The Space Settlement and Development Act of 2015, currently under draft, would promote economic development in space and work to reverse current strictures against property ownership in space.

Which brings us to what might be the biggest obstacle close to being hurdled: who would move to a city on Mars? Well, lots of people claim to be interested, signing up to Mars One’s non-binding longlist of candidates to emigrate to the Red Planet. But López-Alegría, the former ISS resident, says that while he could imagine our space presence being scalable, he wouldn’t volunteer to live permanently in a space city. “The experience of being in space is magnificent,” he says, “but only in the context of being an Earthling and knowing that you’re coming back to Earth.”

• A cosy little house on Mars? Cities in space – in pictures

https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2014/may/16/how-build-city-in-space-nasa-elon-musk-spacex

Mar

2018

What’s Stopping Us from Building Cities in Space? No, It’s Not Tech.

The US has a plan for Americans to live in space. In 2012, the National Research Council was commissioned by Congress to roadmap the future of human space exploration. Last June, the team published its findings in a massive report, which called for several action steps to be taken immediately. One year later, are we on track?

Alissa Walker

One of the report’s authors was designer and Spacehack founder Ariel Waldman, who works on ways to make technical concepts around space colonization more accessible to the public. In 2008 Waldman took a job at NASA to coordinate its CoLab initiative, which allowed NASA scientists to collaborate with outside communities through open-source projects.

The overall response to the report (which you can read in its entirety here) was good, says Waldman. “When the report came out, a lot of different parts surprisingly resonated well with Congress,” she told Gizmodo. In the year since, Waldman has witnessed some encouraging feedback—but also plenty of disheartening trends that are keeping the roadmap stalled.

Of course there are plenty of tech advancements that need to be made to get humans living in space—gotta figure out that radiation protection!—but those challenges aren’t the biggest things holding the US back. There are much bigger political, perceptual, and yes, economic shifts that need to occur to get us thinking about living off-Earth.

Start Cooperating Globally

Statistically, China’s space program is a few decades behind the US, but consider these facts: In a span of ten years the country sent ten people into space. In 2013 they landed a rover on the Moon. The agency is currently working on a mission to Mars and a proposal for its own space station, which is planned for sometime in the 2020s. Soon, China will undoubtably surpass the US in its efforts for space colonization.

Thanks to a 2011 Congressional act that bars the US from collaborating with China’s space program, NASA is not allowed to work directly with the most quickly accelerating efforts to get humans into space. This is a huge problem. “There are only two places that are going into space,” says Waldman, referring to current crewed missions by Russia and China. “We’re not one of them, and we’re not in collaboration with the other one of them.”

Even more frustrating is the fact that certain politicians who are otherwise zealous about human spaceflight are voicing support for the China ban. Take Representative John Culberson, a Texas Republican who has been evangelistic about a mission to Europa. Since this Jupiter moon is thought to have liquid water and a climate which might support life, it’s currently second in priority in the roadmap, and NASA will soon need to make a critical decision about funding it. (Update: As of today, it’s moving forward.) But he has also been vocal about not working with the Chinese.

Many other political figures point to China’s human rights violations as a reason not to align with the country. Yet they seem to overlook the many human rights concerns when it comes to collaborating with Russia.

What could it take to change the US’s policy on going into space with China? A presidential order would help, but that doesn’t seem likely. What’s more plausible are some workarounds that may allow for indirect collaboration without bilateral cooperation. Our existing alliance with the ESA and Russian programs, which have been separately planning a Mars mission with China, might allow some American science to tag along somehow. But competition here is not the way forward. This isn’t a Cold War-era USSR-USA space race, this is all the world’s major space programs except ours working together.

Stop Saying It’s About Saving Humanity

When the roadmap named a human landing on Mars as the first priority for space colonization, the internet got excited. But a lot of the reasoning for going to Mars has been hyperfocused on a single issue: We must find a place to live when Earth no longer lets us live here.

Maybe we’ve all been watching too much Battlestar Galactica. But it’s not just pop culture. How many times have you heard Elon Musk talk about his dreams to live (and die) on Mars to “help ensure the survival of humanity”?

Thanks to a few very strong voices like Musk, the argument to ensure the survival of the human race has become the most-repeated reason for going to Mars. But it’s not a very good one, says Waldman: It’s not evidence-based. We have no idea if living on Mars is feasible, let alone a place where we should be relocating our entire civilization. And that shouldn’t be the motivation behind investing billions of dollars and potentially sacrificing human lives.

“There’s a lot of talk about why we’re going to Mars from the blogosphere, which is a really good thing,” says Waldman. “But no single rationale alone argues for a continuation of human spaceflight.” In fact, the report gives a long list of reasons, which the team was able to track across demographic groups. Of course certain reasons will resonate more with certain people, but the overall answer is more nuanced. Just saying that we need to decamp to Mars as part of some kind of Noah’s Ark scenario isn’t the best one.

Forget the Flag Planting

So much of what seems to motivate any space exploration is the concept of flag planting, which the US pretty much invented: I HEREBY CLAIM THIS MOON FOR AMERICA. Take away these imperialistic aspirations and the goals of human spaceflight become unmeshed with these ideas of nation-building—and a lot more pragmatic.

This is the largest task we’ve undertaken as human race and it requires wider democratization, says Waldman. “If we want to make things like landing humans on Mars happen we will need more collaboration from more people, from more disciplines, from more countries than we currently have.”

What’s incredibly exciting right now is how many developing nations have access to space thanks to swiftly changing technology. It’s not just China’s speedy space timeline that’s an indicator of this. Five years ago India sent a mission to the Moon and now has a spacecraft orbiting Mars. This is not just a pursuit of the wealthy superpowers anymore. More than 70 countries now have space programs—the science that will get us to another solar system could come from any of them.

Just like “saving humanity” is not a good reason to go to Mars, this is not a pursuit to “discover” another planet—and we’re not taking our geopolitical baggage with us. Scientists need to work towards including more voices in these efforts without countries getting all wrapped up in the possibility of laying first claim to Martian mining rights.

Yes, Okay, We Need Money

One of the largest criticisms of the NASA budget that it currently is not adjusted to keep pace with inflation, which is the most often-reported challenge in getting Americans onto other planets. As the report outlined in a series of charts, if the budget is even slightly adjusted for inflation each year, a pathway to Mars becomes much more feasible and much less risky.

In the past year, the Obama administration has championed a “re-energized space program” that has certainly achieved some notable milestones—like a test flight of the Mars-worthy Orion spacecraft and the development of the Space Launch System (SLS) to get it there, as well as several studies to see what happens to humans when they leave Earth for that long. Where the extra funding will come from in the next decade, though, is up to Congress. If the budget doesn’t increase, we’re not going anywhere.

What about corporations like Space X or Virgin Galactic? Commercial ventures might help in the sense that private companies might finance the spacecrafts themselves, says Waldman, but the programs themselves still require funding—and vision. “You’re still talking about hundreds of billions across decades even if it takes zero dollars to build.” And who knows, even companies backed by Elon Musk and Richard Branson could go bankrupt.

Other groups are trying to put numbers together to figure out how to get humans to Mars. Last month, Bill Nye presented a JPL-developed proposal for an orbital settlement around Mars at the Planetary Society’s Humans to Mars summit. Astronauts would leave in 2033 for a one-year stay in Martian orbit (the timing would coincide with the optimal Earth-Mars alignment every 26 months which makes the trip shortest), setting the stage for a landing mission in 2039 or later.

Nye’s full report will be issued later this year, but a proposed budget claims that it can be done using the funds from the human exploration program at NASA (as long as it is adjusted for inflation), if NASA stops investing in the ISS (which is already planned in 2024). One problem with this plan, however, is that it assumes the US will be working independently, not collaborating with other nations, which, as Waldman and others keep pointing out, is really the only way to make sure the US can mount a properly financed, sustained effort to live in space.

Remember, The Golden Age of Space Travel Is Still Coming

There’s one final plea from Waldman, which I found myself thinking about quite a bit after our conversation. Many Americans like to believe that the 1960s were some kind of heyday for human spaceflight—we look back at this period and bemoan the fact that the space program will never be as exciting again.

Waldman says this is kind of a greater delusion that we’ve convinced ourselves of as a culture. Actually, NASA was very low priority for federal spending at the time and there was a lot of pessimism about it in general. In fact, we can only seem to get excited about the idea of human spaceflight when it’s wrapped up in nostalgia. The report compared contemporary public opinion polls about the space program with polls during the Apollo mission. “When asked if Apollo missions were worth the money, during that time people said no,” she says. “The only upticks are when we’re looking back.”

This is not bad news, says Waldman, and I agree. It means that the actions taken in the very near future will be able to change the way people think about going to space. Whether or not we land a human on Mars in our lifetimes, this Golden Age of space exploration is still to come—once we’ve decided as a civilization that we’re committed to making it happen.

https://gizmodo.com/whats-stopping-us-from-building-cities-in-space-no-it-1711985320

Feb

2018

City as Battle Suit

[Note] This article by Matt Jone is from 2009, but like much writing about the nature of cities, has a timeless quality. Cities are like timewarps, each street seeming to hold on to its heyday regardless of when it was. I was drawn to it because it explores the image of the city of the future as presented in science fiction, a realm of mind unrestrained by urban design and necessarily reflecting an imagined culture derived from circumstances of that authors’s time- their very own timewarp. It is an interesting take of the City of the Future.

Matt Jones

The architecture of science fiction has profoundly changed urban design. When building cities of the future, our best guides may be places like comic book megalopolises Mega-City-1 or Transmet.

In February of this year I gave a talk at webstock in New Zealand, entitled “The Demon-Haunted World” – which investigated past visions of future cities in order to reflect upon work being done currently in the field of ‘urban computing’.

In particular I examined the radical work of influential 60’s architecture collective Archigram, who I found through my research had coined the term ‘social software’ back in 1972, 30 years before it was on the lips of Clay Shirky and other internet gurus.

Rather than building, Archigram were perhaps proto-bloggers – publishing a sought-after ‘magazine’ of images, collage, essays and provocations regularly through the 60s which had an enormous impact on architecture and design around the world, right through to the present day. Archigram have featured before on io9, and I’m sure they will again.

They referenced comics – American superhero aesthetics but also the stiff-upper-lips and cut-away precision engineering of Frank Hampson’s Dan Dare and Eagle, alongside pop-music, psychedelia, computing and pulp sci-fi and put it in a blender with a healthy dollop of Brit-eccentricity. They are perhaps most familiar from science-fictional images like their Walking City project, but at the centre of their work was a concern with cities as systems, reflecting the contemporary vogue for cybernetics and belief in automation.

Although Archigram didn’t build their visions, other architects brought aspects of them into the world. Echoes of their “Plug-in city” can undoubtedly be seen in Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers’ Pompidou Centre in Paris. Much of the ‘hi-tech’ style of architecture (chiefly executed by British architects such as Rogers, Norman Foster and Nicholas Grimshaw) popular for corporate HQs and arts centers through the 80s and 90s can be traced back to, if not Archigram, then the same set of pop sci-fi influences that a generation of british schoolboys grew up with – into world-class architects.

Lord Rogers, as he now is, has made a second career of writing and lobbying about the future of cities worldwide. His books “Cities for a small planet” and “Cities for a small country” were based on work his architecture and urban-design practice did during the 80s and 90s, consulting on citymaking and redevelopment with national and regional governments. His work for Shanghai is heavily featured in ‘small planet’ – a plan that proposed the creation of an ecotopian mega city. This was thwarted, but he continues to campaign for renewed approaches to urban living.

Last year I saw him give a talk in London where he described the near-future of cities as one increasingly influenced by telecommunications and technology. He stated that “our cities are increasingly linked and learning” – this seemed to me a recapitulation of Archigram’s strategies, playing out not through giant walking cities but smaller, bottom-up technological interventions. The infrastructures we assemble and carry with us through the city – mobile phones, wireless nodes, computing power, sensor platforms are changing how we interact with it and how it interacts with other places on the planet. After all it was Archigram who said “people are walking architecture.”Dan Hill (a consultant on how digital technology is changing cities for global engineering group Arup) in his epic blog post “The Street as Platform” says, “…the way the street feels may soon be defined by what cannot be seen by the naked eye.”

He goes on to explain:

We can’t see how the street is immersed in a twitching, pulsing cloud of data. This is over and above the well-established electromagnetic radiation, crackles of static, radio waves conveying radio and television broadcasts in digital and analogue forms, police voice traffic. This is a new kind of data, collective and individual, aggregated and discrete, open and closed, constantly logging impossibly detailed patterns of behaviour. The behaviour of the street.

Adam Greenfield, a design director at Nokia, wrote one of the defining texts on the design and use of ubiquitous computing or ‘ubicomp’ called “Everyware” and is about to release a follow-up on urban environments and technology called “The city is here for you to use”. In a recent talk he framed a number of ways in which the access to data about your surroundings that Hill describes will change our attitude towards the city. He posits that we will move from a city we browser and wander to a ‘searchable, query-able’ city that we can not only read, but write-to as a medium.

He states:

The bottom-line is a city that responds to the behaviour of its users in something close to real-time, and in turn begins to shape that behaviour.

Again, we’re not so far away from what Archigram were examining in the 60’s. Behaviour and information as the raw material to design cities with as much as steel, glass and concrete.

The city of the future increases its role as an actor in our lives, affecting our lives. This of course, is a recurrent theme in science-fiction and fantasy. In movies, it’s hard to get past the paradigm-defining dystopic backdrop of the city in Bladerunner, or the fin-de-siècle late-capitalism cage of the nameless, anonymous, bounded city of the Matrix. Perhaps more resonant of the future described by Greenfield is the ever-changing stage-set of Alex Proyas’ Dark City.

For some of the greatest-city-as-actor stories though, it’s perhaps no suprise that we have to turn to comics as Archigram did – and the eponymous city of Warren Ellis and Darick Robertson’s Transmetropolitan as documented and half-destroyed by gonzo future journalist-messiah Spider Jerusalem.

Transmet’s city binds together perfectly a number of future-city fiction’s favourite themes: overwhelming size (reminiscent of the BAMA, or “Boston-Atlanta Metropolitan Axis from William Gibson’s “Sprawl” trilogy), patchworks of ‘cultural reservations’ (Stephenson’s Snowcrashwith it’s three-ring-binder-governed, franchise-run-statelets) and a constant unrelenting future-shock as everyday as the weather… For which we can look to the comics-futrue-city grand-daddy of them all: Mega-City-1.

Ah – The Big Meg, where at any moment on the mile-high Zipstrips you might be flattened by a rogue Boinger, set-upon by a Futsie and thrown down onto the skedways far below, offered an illicit bag of umpty-candy or stookie-glands and find yourself instantly at the mercy of the Judges. If you grew up on 2000AD like me, then your mind is probably now filled with a vivid picture of the biggest, toughest, weirdest future city there’s ever been.

This is a future city that has been lovingly-detailed, weekly, for over three decades years, as artist Matt Brooker (who goes by the psuedonym D’Israeli) points out:

Working on Lowlife, with its Mega-City One setting freed from the presence of Judge Dredd, I found myself thinking about the city and its place in the Dredd/2000AD franchise. And it occurred to me that, really, the city is the actual star of Judge Dredd. I mean, Dredd himself is a man of limited attributes and predictable reactions. His value is giving us a fixed point, a window through which to explore the endless fountain of new phenomena that is the Mega-City. It’s the Mega-City that powers Judge Dredd, and Judge Dredd that has powered 2000AD for the last 30 years.

Brooker, from his keen-eyed-viewpoint as someone currently illustrating MC-1, examines the differing visions that artists like Carlos Ezquerra and Mike McMahon have brought to the city over the years in a wonderful blog post which I heartily recommend you read.

Were Mega-City One’s creators influenced by Archigram or other radical architects?

I’d venture a “yes” on that. Mike McMahon, seen to many including Brooker and myself, as one of the definitive portrayals of The Big Meg renders the giant, town-within-a-city Blocks as “pepperpots” organic forms reminiscent of Ken Yeang (pictured below), or (former Rogers-collaborator) Renzo Piano’s “green skyscrapers”.

While I’m unsure of the claim that MC-1 can trace it’s lineage back to radical 60’s architecture, it seems that the influence flowing the other direction, from comicbook to architect, is far clearer. Here in the UK, the Architect’s Journal went as far as to name it the number one comic book city.

Echoing Brooker’s thoughts, they exclaim:

Mega City One is the ultimate comic book city: bigger, badder, and more spectacular than its rivals. It’s underlying design principle is simple – exaggeration – which actually lends it a coherence and character unlike any other. While Batman’s Gotham City and Superman’s Metropolis largely reflect the character of the superheroes who inhabit them (Gotham is grim, Metropolis shines) Mega City One presents an exuberant, absurd foil to Dredd’s rigid, monotonous outlook.

Back in our world, the exaggerated mega-city is going through a bit of bad patch. The bling’d up ultraskyscraping and bespoke island-terraforming of Dubai is on hold until capitalism reboots, and changes in political fortune have nixed the futuristic, ubicomp’d-up Arup-designed ecotopia of Dongtan in China.

But, these are but speedbumps on the road to the future city.

There are still ongoing efforts to create planned, model future cities such as one that Nick Durrant of design consultancy Plot is working on in Abu Dhabi: Masdar City. It’s designed by another alumni of the British Hi-tech school – Sir Norman Foster. “Zero waste, carbon neutral, car free” is the slogan, and a close eye is being kept on it as a test-bed for clean-tech in cities.

We are now a predominantly urban species, with over 50% of humanity living in a city. The overwhelming majority of these are not old post-industrial world cities such as London or New York, but large chaotic sprawls of the industrialising world such as the “maximum cities” of Mumbai or Guangzhou. Here the infrastructures are layered, ad-hoc, adaptive and personal – people there really are walking architecture, as Archigram said.

Hacking post-industrial cities is becoming a necessity also. The “shrinking cities” project is monitoring the trend in the west toward dwindling futures for cities such as Detroit and Liverpool.

They claim:

In the 21st century, the historically unique epoch of growth that began with industrialization 200 years ago will come to an end. In particular, climate change, dwindling fossil sources of energy, demographic aging, and rationalization in the service industry will lead to new forms of urban shrinking and a marked increase in the number of shrinking cities.

This scene, though not pretending to show that a perfect world is possible nevertheless indicates that tomorrow’s town could be pleasant places to live, work and play in.
1 Electric monorail train provides an effective though not especially elegant solution to the problem of hight speed travel
2 below the line runs a pipe network throudht which most bulk cargo (such as fuel, water,grain) is piped, silently and efficiently.
3 The city is green all over, the result of a massive tree planting scheme stated in the 1950s. It is estimated by present day researchers that every man woman and child on Earth meeds to plant tree a day in order to keep a balance with those that are removed or kill. The worlds main oxygen producing area is, at present, the Brazilian rain forest. This is being chopped down slowly but surely. A balance must be kept
4 Non-polluting yet lowered by hydrogen fuel whose wasted is water flies quietly across the sky
5 Fumeless electric vehicles weed for local travel, Trucks are only needed for short distance hauls as pipe system carry most cargo
6 The worst excesses of mid 20th century ‘brutalist’ architecture are camouflaged with flowering vines
7 Bicycles provide the basic means of transport for people to bet about over short distances. Special bikeways like this keep cyclist apart from truck and cars.

However, I’m optimistic about the future of cities. I’d contend cities are not just engines of invention in stories, they themselves are powerful engines of culture and re-invention.

David Byrne in the WSJ, as quoted by entrepreneur and co-founder of Flickr Caterina Fake, on her blog recently:

A city can’t be too small. Size guarantees anonymity-if you make an embarrassing mistake in a large city, and it’s not on the cover of the Post, you can probably try again. The generous attitude towards failure that big cities afford is invaluable-it’s how things get created. In a small town everyone knows about your failures, so you are more careful about what you might attempt.

Patron saint of cities, Jane Jacobs, in her book “The Economy of Cities” put forward the ‘engines of invention’ argument in her theory of ‘import replacement’:

…when a city begins to locally produce goods which it formerly imported, e.g., Tokyo bicycle factories replacing Tokyo bicycle importers in the 1800s.

Jacobs claims that import replacement builds up local infrastructure, skills, and production. Jacobs also claims that the increased produce is exported to other cities, giving those other cities a new opportunity to engage in import replacement, thus producing a positive cycle of growth.

Urban computing and gaming specialist, founder of Area/Code and ITP professor Kevin Slavin showed me a presentation by architect Dan Pitera about the scale and future of Detroit, and associated scenarios by city planners that would see the shrinking city deliberately intensify – creating urban farming zones from derelict areas so that it can feed itself locally. Import replacement writ large.

He also told me that 400 cities worldwide independently of their ‘host country’ agreed to follow the Kyoto protocol. Cities are entities that network outside of nations as their wealth often exceeds that of the rest of the nation put together – it’s natural they solve transnational, global problems.

Which leads me back to science-fiction. Warren Ellis created a character called Jack Hawksmoor in his superhero comic series The Authority.

The surname is a nice nod toward psychogeography and city-fans: Hawksmoor was an architect and progeny of Sir Christopher Wren, fictionalised into a murderous semi-mystical figure who shaped the city into a giant magical apparatus by Peter Ackroyd in an eponymous novel.

Ellis’ Hawksmoor, however, was abducted multiple times, seemingly by aliens, and surgically adapted to be ultimately suited to live in cities – they speak to him and he gains nourishment from them. If you’ll excuse the spoiler, the zenith of Hawksmoor’s adventures with cities come when he finds the purpose behind the modifications – he was not altered by aliens but by future humans in order to defend the early 21st century against a time-travelling 73rd century Cleveland gone berserk. Hawksmoor defeats the giant, monstrous sentient city by wrapping himself in Tokyo to form a massive concrete battlesuit.

Cities are the best battlesuits we have.

It seem to me that as we better learn how to design, use and live in cities – we all have a future.

Matt Jones is design director at Berg in London. He has worked as a designer for the BBC and Nokia. He began his career studying architecture, and writes a blog called Magical Nihilism.

https://io9.gizmodo.com/5362912/the-city-is-a-battlesuit-for-surviving-the-future

Feb

2018

Cities are the Future of Human Evolution

Humans began to live in urban settlements about 7 thousand years ago. As humans continued to evolve over the millennia, so too did our cities. Now, our cities are about to change again — and they’re going to look more like ancient Machu Picchu than the gleaming towers of glass and steel we have today.

As any urban dweller can tell you, the one thing that’s constant in city life is change. Buildings rise up and are torn down; parks bloom out of old train tracks; swimming pools become ice rinks that become arcades and then turn into Whole Foods. For this reason, urban historian Spiro Kostof calls the city a “process.” Cities change with the peoples that live in them, but they are also a repository of history. Even as we relentlessly build new structures, we prefer to remain in these old places where we can live in what’s left of cities and cultures that are hundreds or even thousands of years gone.

Early Cities

Some of the earliest cities, in regions that are now called Turkey, Syria and Peru, were probably built at roughly the same time that humans were developing agriculture. As anthropologist Elizabeth Stone has found, many of the earliest city jobs probably involved farming. In the Mesopotamian cities she studies, people worked in orchards and farms just outside the city walls. These farmers built their homes from mud and brick, and as buildings crumbled into dust, they built new ones on top of the old.

As a result, many of these early cities eroded into mounds of earth over time. But even in their heyday, they would have probably looked a bit like clay boxes atop an earthen mound, surrounded by the plants, trees, and dairy animals that their inhabitants cultivated.

This image was lost some time after publication, but you can still view it here.
Like the people of the Middle East, the groups who later became the Inca in South America also built cities as an extension of their farms. Living as they did in a mountainous, coastal region, the Inca’s forebears and the Inca themselves had to create agricultural technologies on nearly vertical landscapes. They learned which crops could thrive in valleys, and which would survive in terraced farms that looked like vast steps cut into the slopes of their mountain cities. And they experimented with elaborate irrigation systems that relied on gravity to bring water to their farms.

Is the City Evolving Too Fast?

Over time, many early farm cities grew into political city-states, were swallowed by nations, and eventually became powerhouses for the nineteenth century industrial revolution. Of course many early cities simply died out, and new cities were built that suited emerging forms of human social organization. For most of human history, however, the city was an aberration: the majority of people lived in villages and other small communities.

All that changed in the twenty-first century. In 1800, according to estimates made by the UN, only 3 percent of the world’s population lived in cities. Today, more than half the world’s population lives in urban areas, and by 2050 the UN estimates that will be more like 67 percent. In developed countries, that percentage will be higher.

Homo sapiens is evolving into an urban species. Already, our genomes have been transformed by one development associated with city growth: agriculture. The genes that allow adults to process the lactose in milk from farm animals have spread like wildfire through the population in under 10,000 years — probably because of the tremendous survival advantage in being able to eat the products of animal husbandry.

Still, city life sometimes feels much too crazy and complex for simple hominins like ourselves. Have our own urban creations evolved more quickly than we have? The answer is no. As evolutionary biologist Marlene Zuk has argued:

Neither we nor any other species have ever been a seamless match with the environment. Instead, our adaptation is more like a broken zipper, with some teeth that align and others that gape apart.

Just because our urban environments don’t always feel perfectly comfortable doesn’t mean they aren’t also part of our our ongoing process of adaptation. As I said earlier, the city reflects both human history and our present state. It’s a process, always transforming, but always reflecting who humans are — and who we are becoming.

The Cities of Tomorrow

Now that the majority of humans live in cities, we’re going to be confronting a new set of problems in urban life. For one thing, natural disasters in cities can cause much greater numbers of fatalities than in sparse, rural communities. So the cities of tomorrow will need to be robust against many kinds of disaster, from earthquakes and floods, to radiation bombardment. It’s possible that many cities will built partly under ground, and partly under water. They might even be built inside a single building surrounded by farms. Not only will such structures allow us to conserve space, but layers of earth and water are excellent protection against radiation.

https://io9.gizmodo.com/cities-are-the-future-of-human-evolution-493082761

Feb

2018

Can Paolo Soleri’s Arcology Designs be Built?

Fifty years ago a visionary architect in Arizona began promoting an idea far ahead of its time.

Maybe its time has come.

Paolo Soleri had ideas that were beyond the time in which he lived but advancing technology and evolving perceptions of city life may soon revitalize his dreams.

I was inspired by his ideas, but quickly realized the limitations that he was not addressing, which for me were the logistics of so many people living in a building, all of them needing supplies and belongings moved into and out of their homes, all of the businesses would have the same issues as well.

No cars or trucks were envisioned with his designs and the plans seemed to have living and work spaces built close and closer. This was another one of the issues expected to be solved when the building could be built, but not addressed in his work.

It was a good idea that needed improvement. It has been a lingering source of inspiration over the years since I first met Solari at his Paradise Valley Studio because I have always believed that these large integrated structures will be built perhaps not as Solari envisioned, but built in some fashion just the same.

In the western US, the roads between urban areas are traversed by by thousands of vehicles each day and the potential to build in these area has more to do with lack of support services than anything else, Many beautiful locations within an easy drive of metro areas are available for new construction, and as I have driven these highways the thought has come to me that Soleri’s Linear Cities would work in these areas.

https://io9.gizmodo.com/paolo-soleri-and-the-cities-of-the-future-509049258

Jan

2018

ThyssenKrupp’s New Vertizontal Elevator System

Yes, I coined this “Vertizontal” name to make it easier to write about on this blog. The system lacks a simple way to say what it is and this works for me.

Otherwise known as the world’s first rope-less, horizontal-vertical elevator system, has been installed inside of the ThyssenKrupp purpose-built innovation test tower in Germany. Named Multi, the groundbreaking system has been developed by the elevator manufacturer to address a variety of issues with systems using wire-rope to move elevator cabins in a shaft.

Through the use of multiple maglev adapted cabins, which operate in the same shaft on an electromagnetic track, it makes it possible to travel sideways as well as up and down.

Leveraging the linear motor technology developed for the magnetic levitation Transrapid train, the cabins move up one shaft, travel horizontally, and then come down another in a continuous loop, much like a metro system inside a building.

Exchanger mechanisms like railway switches help to guide the cars, which are mounted with carbon-fibre bearings called slings that allow them to change direction.

Antony Wood, executive director of The Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat has hailed the system as “the biggest development in the elevator industry since the invention of the safety elevator some 165 years ago.”

ThyssenKrupp first unveiled its ambitions to build the system back in 2014.

The company now reports that Multi can achieve up to 50 per cent higher transport capacity and reduce peak power demand by as much as 60 per cent when compared to conventional elevator systems.

“These two factors mean a dramatic improvement for high-rise buildings,” said the brand in a statement. “Additionally, since Multi can move sideways as well as vertically, and without any height limitations, it enables unprecedented possibilities in the architecture and design of buildings.”

Because it runs on magnets and motors, Multi requires fewer and smaller shafts than conventional cable operated elevators. ThyssenKrupp says that the system can increase a building’s usable area by up to 25 per cent.

Currently elevator-escalator footprints can occupy up to 40 per cent of a high-rise building’s floor space, depending on the building height.

In addition, it requires lower peak power permitting a better management of the building’s energy needs.

“We believe Multi is a genuine game-changer that will truly transform the way people move, work and live in our built environment,” said ThyssenKrupp’s chairman of executive board, Andreas Schierenbeck, at the system’s launch.

“It will reduce waiting times for passengers and take up significantly less space within the building. Multi is a key offering that truly represents a landmark revolution in the elevator industry.”

Following the installation of the system across three shafts at ThyssenKrupp’s 246-metre-tall test tower in Rottweil, Germany, the German multinational announced that OVG Real Estate would be Multi’s first customer.

The European real estate business has outlined plans to install the system in the new East Side Tower building in Berlin, which has been touted as the world’s most sustainable office building.

dancadmin

Humans in ‘space cities’ orbiting Earth by 2100: Al Globus

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What’s Stopping Us from Building Cities in Space? No, It’s Not Tech.

Start Cooperating Globally

Stop Saying It’s About Saving Humanity

Forget the Flag Planting

Yes, Okay, We Need Money

Remember, The Golden Age of Space Travel Is Still Coming

City as Battle Suit

Cities are the Future of Human Evolution

Can Paolo Soleri’s Arcology Designs be Built?

ThyssenKrupp’s New Vertizontal Elevator System

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