Tonight was a nostalgia rush. showed (is still showing?) a documentary about Gerard K O'Neill, mostly forgotten now but semi-famous in the 1970s and 1980s for his advocacy of "space colonies", human habitats in space built as massive rotating cylinders 1/
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It was a wild concept among other wild concepts, like giant solar power satellites to beam power down to Earth as microwaves & electromagnetic "mass drivers" to shoot material off the Moon to build the "O'Neill cylinders" (conceived of as looking like Marin County CA inside) 2/
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The Marin County resemblance was no accident, as the "space colonization" movement was a very California thing, attracting straitlaced aerospace engineers and hippies alike, up to & including Timothy Leary ("SMI2LE = Space Migration, Increased Intelligence, Life Extension") 3/
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Neat! There’s a nice section on it in passing in George Dyson’s Starship and the Canoe, where Freeman Dyson argues with O’Neill who was his neighbor at the time. Dyson believed in scrappy Mayflower type tough, pilgrim exploration and thought O’Neill’s concepts were too luxury.
Replying to
Yeah, one of the O'Neill cylinder paintings even includes a mini Golden Gate Bridge (!). Incidentally Freeman Dyson appears in the O'Neill documentary, filmed shortly before his death. Despite the arguments, Dyson later served as President of O'Neill's Space Studies Institute.
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