Living in Outer Space: Back to the Future

外太空生活：回到未来

 

Jeff Bezos’s Ambition to Colonise Space Is Straight from the 1970s

杰夫·贝佐斯的太空殖民壮志直接承袭自上世纪70年代

It was more interesting than another quarterly business update. On May 9th Jeff Bezos, the boss of Amazon, had his coming-out party as a space cadet. Mr Bezos, who is the world’s richest man, has long been interested in using his fortune to advance the cause of space flight. His private rocketry firm, Blue Origin, was founded in 2000. But he has been less of a publicity seeker than Elon Musk, the founder of SpaceX and the world’s best-known enthusiast for outer space.

这可比发布又一季的财报有意思。5月9日，亚马逊的老板杰夫·贝佐斯作为太空探索界的新人首次正式“亮相”。这位世界首富早就有志于用自己的财富推动航天事业。他的私人火箭公司蓝色起源（Blue Origin）成立于2000年。但他没有SpaceX的创始人、也是最出名的外太空爱好者伊隆·马斯克那么好出风头。

No longer. During an hour-long presentation, Mr Bezos introduced Blue Origin’s prototype lunar lander, a machine that could be ready, he said, to meet America’s ambitions to return to the Moon by 2024. More striking were his plans for the farther future. Mr Musk wants humans to colonise Mars as an insurance policy should anything happen to Earth. Mr Bezos has no interest in Mars, or indeed any other planet in the solar system, all of which (except Earth) are pretty inhospitable places. Instead, he thinks humans should build their new space-going homes from scratch.

现在不是了。在一个小时的演讲中，贝佐斯介绍了蓝色起源研发的月球登陆器原型机。他说这台机器将准备就绪，实现美国在2024年重返月球的雄心。更惊人的是他对更遥远未来的计划。马斯克希望人类殖民火星，作为地球发生灾难后的退路。贝佐斯对火星或太阳系中的任何其他行星都没兴趣。既然所有那些行星（地球除外）基本都不适宜人类居住，他认为人类应该从零开始建造新的太空家园。

The idea is not new. Mr Bezos studied at Princeton, and one of his professors was Gerard O’Neill, a physicist. In 1976 O’Neill published “The High Frontier”, a bestselling book in which he sketched out the basic engineering principles of how such space habitats might work. It was exactly those sorts of habitat that Mr Bezos advocated as the way humans would live in the future.

他的构想并不新鲜。他曾在普林斯顿大学求学，他的一位教授是物理学家杰拉德·奥尼尔（Gerard O’Neill）。1976年，奥尼尔出版了畅销书《太空殖民地》（The High Frontier），概述了这类太空栖息地将可能如何运作的基本工程原理。贝佐斯倡导的人类未来的生活方式和奥尼尔描绘的那类栖息地一模一样。

O’Neill’s book offered three shapes: a cylinder, a pair of cylinders or a torus. All are hollow, with the living surface built on the inside. All rotate, with the centrifugal force felt at the walls standing in for gravity. Sunlight provides both energy – through solar panels – and illumination, thanks to a system of mirrors and windows. And all are on a heroic scale. The biggest are tens of kilometres long and have enough living room for millions of people.

奥尼尔在书中给出了三种形状的栖息地：圆柱体、一对圆柱体，或一个圆环体。它们都是中空的，生活区建在内部。不管哪种形状都要旋转，通过离心力在内壁模拟重力。阳光通过太阳能电池板提供能源，并通过镜子和窗户系统提供照明。所有栖息地都规模巨大。最大的长数十公里，可容纳数百万人。

Florentine Renaissance

佛罗伦萨的复兴

For that reason, they would have to be built by a species that had already mastered space travel, using resources harvested from the asteroid belt (like Mr Musk, Mr Bezos hopes to drive down the cost of space flight as a first step). They would be strange places to live. The land would curve visibly up the sides of the structure. The superstructure of the habitat would arch across the “sky”. And rotation is not a perfect substitute for gravity, so moving objects would behave oddly, particularly if the habitat were small. But, said Mr Bezos, they also offer several advantages. Climates could be engineered (“Maui on its best day, all year long”). The best bits of Earth could be replicated elsewhere.

这样的太空栖息地必须由已经掌握太空旅行的物种利用从小行星带收集的资源来建造（和马斯克一样，贝佐斯希望首先降低太空飞行的成本）。在这样的栖息地生活将是完全陌生的体验。地面将沿栖息地两侧明显弯曲，栖息地的上部结构将横架在“天空”上。旋转的离心力无法完美替代重力，因此物体移动的情形会很奇怪，特别是如果栖息地很小的话。但贝佐斯说，这些栖息地也有其优点。这里可以人工调节气候（“全年都能有毛伊岛上最好的天气”）。地球上最好的地方可以在其他地方重现。

Their biggest advantage, though, is the sheer amount of living space they would create. Mr Bezos’s ultimate justification for pursuing such megaprojects is his worry about the mismatch between the exponential process of population growth and the finiteness of Earth’s resources. He gave the example of energy demand, which, he says, has historically grown by around 3% a year. He argues that if this were to continue, Earth would, in a couple of centuries, need to be covered completely by solar panels. With the resources of the solar system at its command, however, and thousands of habitats scattered through space, the human population could comfortably grow to a trillion or more.

但这些栖息地最大的优势是它们能创造出巨大的生活空间。贝佐斯追求这些大型项目的最根本理由是担心地球有限的资源无法支撑指数级的人口增长。他以能源需求为例，指出能源需求以每年约3%的速度增长。他认为，如果以这样的速度继续下去，几个世纪后地球就需要完全被太阳能电池板覆盖才够。但是，如果人类掌握了太阳系的资源，有了散布在太空中成千上万的栖息地，人口可以增长到万亿甚至更多都没问题。

Perhaps. It is notable that Mr Bezos’s justifications come from the same era as his proposed solutions. It is a mathematical truism that exponential growth will eventually overwhelm any fixed, finite quantity. Such arguments were most famously applied to natural resources in “The Limits to Growth”, published by the Club of Rome in 1972. Not so much a bold new future, then, but a blast from the past.

 

或许是吧。值得注意的是，贝佐斯所说的理由与他提出的解决方案源自相同的时代。指数增长最终将超过任何固定的、有限的量值，这是数学上的老生常谈。1972年智库罗马俱乐部（Club of Rome）发表的报告《增长的极限》（The Limits to Growth）用它来论述自然资源的限制，震动世界。所以太空栖息地算不上多大胆的新未来，只是旧事重提。

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