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If the space science fiction spaces of Blue Origin in Bezos seem familiar to you, it's because they are inspired by the work of his college teacher, the late physicist Gerard O'Neill.
One afternoon in Washington, a man gave a very ambitious talk on the future of humans in space. We would need to go live there, he said to his audience, because the expansion of human life beyond the Earth was the only alternative to stagnation and stasis .
It was a turbulent period: cultural changes seemed to have slowed down and people were increasingly aware that resources on Earth were dwindling, while pollution and environmental destruction were growing. If our horizons have not widened, warned the man, they could end up being limited forever.
His plan to change these trends began with an outpost on the moon. There, a small number of people could start a mining operation that would support the next phase – the construction of large-scale rotating orbiting habitats, which would contain reconstructions of the Earth's cities and landscapes and make millions of them.
This presentation took place in the summer of 1975, when Princeton physicist Gerard O'Neill (1927-1992) informed Congress of a plan he was working on with NASA. However, the description of O'Neill's presentation could apply note after note to a conference that Amazon's founder Jeff Bezos gave on May 9 in Washington, unveiling Blue Origin's project of his space flights for a lunar lander and a long-term vision of space habitats. . Some of the technology and people have changed (the Bezos conversation was broadcast live on Twitter), but the overall goals, methods and reason for moving in space remained the same.
With so many obvious similarities between these two visions, the question is: have we really learned anything in the last 50 years about how to plan for a better human future?
O'Neill's project began in 1969. Despite the success of Apollo's lunar landing, his Princeton physics students were beginning to be disappointed by engineering's prospects of changing the world for the better. The Vietnam War was prolonged and persistent social and racial inequality made the technology seem inadequate to deal with political changes. O'Neill asked a group of advanced students to study a direct question: "Is the surface of a planet really the ideal place for an expanding technological civilization?
The "O Neill Colonies" that he designed to answer this question, first with his students, then with teams of architects, planners, engineers and of artists, were huge cylinders, spheres and tori with new surfaces for new types of civilizations inside. O'Neill's book on this work, The high border, has been read by millions of people and has remained printed almost continuously.
Jeff Bezos was one of Gerard O'Neill's students in Princeton in the mid-1980s. At that time, NASA's cultural interest and funding for O'Neill's ideas had reached their peak. Gerard O'Neill had proposed his vast habitats as a solution to the problem of overpopulation, industrial pollution, the extinction of ecosystems, the energy crisis and the wars of culture. But in the days of Reagan and Thatcher, the economic expansion on the surface of the Earth – without thinking of its consequences – seemed to have returned to the menu. Meanwhile, the appetite for large-scale public spending had diminished.
Today, in 2019, Jeff Bezos wants his private space company to take over the public imagination of life in the space. Bezos is at the head of a retail empire and knows how to sell an image, but what he is offering today is a diluted version of nostalgia for yesterday's future. Bezos' proposal is a version of O'Neill's project that seems less futuristic than its predecessor.
Bezos' proposal is a version of O'Neill's project that seems less futuristic than its predecessor.
The renderings produced for the O'Neill project of the 1970s were painted by Rick Guidice, who was trained as an architect and graphic designer, and by Don Davis, who has experience illustrating global science. Both men had roots in the counterculture and filled their space-habitat interior with The domes of Buckminster Fuller and the architectural megastructures of Reyner Banham. In 1975, it was still the future.
But the renderings of Bezos, like his great ideas, contain nothing new. One is a pastiche of the Singapore skyline. Another shows what the hometown of Amazon, Seattle looks like. (Maybe after his search for QG2 is complete, he will build Amazon HQ3 into orbit, as per spec.) There is a train (with two lanes, so do not call it a monorail) walking past a university campus and a dead-end representation of an American family farm with grain silos and red-planked barns.
A third reproduction reproduces the medieval Florence. In the distance, we see a copy of the Forbidden City in Beijing, perhaps a nod to Alibaba, Amazon's Chinese rival.
The inclusion of Blue Origin in the renderings of Marina Bay Sands (2010), a hotel of Moshe Safdie's architect, and the Brutalist Geisel Library (1970) of the University of California at San Diego recalls how much we have fallen since the heyday of megastructure architecture. Before designing luxury hotels, Safdie had demonstrated, in its Habitat 67 project in Montreal, that megastructures could create a human-sized environment where ordinary people would gather, and that Geisel is a monument to the memory of the city. 39, architecture and public institutions. . In the imagination of Bezos, older and more future buildings become parodied, privatized and zombified. The spaces are soaked in thick rays of light, as if to preserve all this architecture in a giant pot of peaceful honey.
It's not just the images that are obsolete. The framework and the assumptions on which the whole company is based are also obsolete. From the point of view of 2019, the simple optimism of 1975 seems picturesque. O'Neill has overlooked the complex entanglement of unexpected consequences that make the design of an ecosystem much more complex than it was at the beginning – problems reported a decade before by biologist, science writer and cultural critic Rachel Carson. Bezos also does not deal with these complexities and strangers. Even though the political divisions are wider than they have been since the 1960s and a climate crisis is about to begin, we have not yet taken up these challenges with meaningful concerted action.
In his speech last week, to illustrate O'Neill's concepts, Bezos broadcast a video excerpt of a 1975 television interview with the physicist, alongside science fiction writer Isaac Asimov. He said that he had forgotten a moment late in the interview, when an ironic Asimov speculates on the resolution of the conflict on Earth by building "an Israel in space, a Palestine in the world." space, a Northern Ireland in the space … ". In the same interview, O'Neill joked that the real question was whether his wife would go into space with him. He said that she would, because she liked to cook and would like to manage the restaurants there. Bezos did not show this part either.
These moments highlight persistent uncertainties in the larger project. Is it even possible to build new worlds from scratch, and if so, for whom would they be built? Bezos is as much a real estate developer as a technology leader. He mentions that the Earth, in its scenario, would be "light industrial and commercial", but what will happen to the old world?
During his presentation, Bezos presented a slide with a simple binary: "Our choice: Stasis & Rationing or Dynamism & Growth". The reasons for this false choice seem suspicious when they are presented by the head of a company renowned for its voracious pursuit of expansion at any price. But there is another contradiction here: Bezos sees himself downright on the side of dynamism and change, while he is actually the standard-bearer of an old status quo.
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