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Humans could live on giant orbs floating in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter within the next 15 years.
This is claimed by top scientist Pekka Janhunen, who claims that millions of people could inhabit a mega-city in space by 2026.
Dr Janhunen, an astrophysicist at the Finnish Meteorological Institute in Helsinki, described his vision in a research article published this month.
He outlined the plan for the “mega-satellites” floating around the dwarf planet Ceres, which is about 325 million miles from Earth.
“The motivation is to have a settlement with artificial gravity that allows for growth beyond the living surface of the Earth,” Dr. Janhunen wrote.
The vast majority of plots to set up distant worlds revolve around the Moon or Mars. This is largely due to their proximity to Earth.
Dr. Janhunen’s proposal, on the other hand, seems a bit further.
Its disc-shaped habitat is said to have thousands of cylindrical structures, each housing more than 50,000 people.
These pods would be linked by strong magnets and generate artificial gravity as they slowly rotate.
Residents would extract resources from Ceres 600 miles below the settlement and lift them up using “space elevators,” Dr Janhunen said.
“Lifting Ceres materials is energetically inexpensive compared to transforming them into habitats, if a space elevator is used,” he wrote.
“Because Ceres has low gravity and spins relatively fast, the space elevator is doable.”
Ceres – the largest object in the asteroid belt – is the best destination for settlements outside the world due to its nitrogen-rich atmosphere, Dr Janhunen added.
This would make it easier for settlers to create Earth-like conditions than those colonizing the harsher, carbon dioxide-rich environment of Mars.
This does not address threats from rogue asteroids or space radiation, although Dr Janhunen, who has worked with a number of Finnish researchers on the paper, has also considered it.
He proposed that giant cylindrical mirrors placed around the mega-satellite could protect it from bombardments of all kinds.
These mirrors would also focus sunlight on the habitat for growing crops and other plants.
It all sounds pretty rosy, but Dr Janhunen also pointed out a number of issues with the plans.
On the one hand, there is the not-so-small obstacle of having people steal from Ceres.
NASA sent a probe there in 2015, a journey that took eight years – far too long to support hundreds of people using current technology.
Dr Janhunen also admitted that the energy required to lift Ceres’ building materials into orbit would be a major obstacle.
The research was published on January 6 in the preprinted journal Arxiv. It has not yet been evaluated by scientists.
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