Colonies O'Neill: A decades-long dream that has lasted for decades

Last week, Amazon's founder, Jeff Bezos, unveiled the new lunar lander of his spaceship company, dubbed Blue Moon, and he set out a broad and bold vision of the future of the future. 39, humanity in space. Faced with the limits of resources here on Earth, mainly energy, he evoked life in space as a solution.

"If we enter the solar system, for all intents and purposes, we have unlimited resources," said Bezos. "We could have a billion people in the solar system." the colonies really stay in the space.

To this end, Bezos has instead suggested people to consider settling in the O Neill settlements, a futuristic concept of spatial implantation that was first conceived several decades ago. "They are very large structures, kilometers at a time, and they can hold a million people or more each."

Gerard O'Neill was a physicist at Princeton University. He joined NASA in the 1970s as part of a series of workshops dedicated to exploring effective ways for humans to live outside the world. In addition to influencing Bezos, his ideas have also profoundly affected the number of experts and space enthusiasts who think about realistic lifestyles in space.

"What will the space colonies look like?" One day asked the Institute of Space Sciences he had founded. "First of all, there is no point in going out into space if the future we see is a barren future, to live in cans. We must be able to recreate, in space, habitats as beautiful, as Earth-like as the most beautiful parts of the planet Earth – and we can not do it. "Of course, neither O 'Neill nor anyone has since Such a habitat, but in many ways the concepts he developed half a century ago remain one of the options the more practical for large-scale and long-term space housing.