In May, Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos announced plans to launch a moon landing by 2024, in a meeting with representatives of his private space company, Blue Origin.
The image of migration to space in this plan was not first thought by Jeff Bezos, but was based on a grand idea that one physicist claimed 40 years ago. In the interview, Jeff Bezos introduced the story of the American physicist Gerard Kitchen O’Neill. One day in 1969, during his lecture, he asked the alien planet surface whether mankind is the best place to enter the solar system. Intuitively, the surface of the star like the earth is good for human activity. O’Neill, however, came to the conclusion that it was theoretically inadequate as a result of various calculations with students. The reason is that Mars or Venus next to the Earth is far from the Earth because its surface and gravity are smaller and too far away from the Earth.
In the summer of 1975, O’Neil announced a new space exploration initiative. O’Neill’s idea was to design the Space Colony, a large-scale space station for mankind to live in the extraterrestrial, at the Lagrangian point between the sun, the moon and the earth.
In O’Neill’s view, the space colonies are 3 to 6 kilometers in diameter and 30 kilometers in length and consist of huge cylinders. On the inner wall, there is a space where mankind can dwell, and the cylinder rotates to make artificial gravity. It also reflected the idea of bringing sunlight into the sun by using a movable mirror to create day and night.
Unfortunately, Space Colony construction is not realized, but Space Colony, which appears in the animation Gundam Gundam, is known to model this idea.
Jeff Bezos, who majored in electrical engineering and computer science at Princeton University in 1980, said he did a job with O’Neill. This is the reason why Bezos announced the idea of entering the space based on O’Neill’s idea. In fact, the image that Bezos showed during the presentation depicts O’Neill’s inner space colony reproduction.
The space colony project is based on the idea of science based on the idea of physics, but now it is pointed out that it should be different from the contents 40 years ago. O’Neill did not understand the complexity of the environmental ecosystem. Even if you can build a space colony as planned by O’Neil, it is very difficult to keep the complex environmental ecosystem inside as it is. It is also argued that Bezos is not working on the complexity and unknown aspects of environmental ecosystems.
Also during the presentation, Bezos showed the talks of O’Neill and SF writer Isaac Asimov. Asymorp says that no one has ever imagined the question of whether there was a plan like O’Neill’s Space Colony, and that the SF writer replies that he thinks that humans are likely to live on the planet.
Asymorp says that if he builds things like Israel, Palestine and Northern Ireland in the universe, he will be a bit cynical about the end of the conflict, or is he really going to go to space with his wife? He wants to run a restaurant in space I also joke that I would not.
Experts say they can highlight the uncertainty remaining in large-scale projects. An expert says Bezos is a leader in ICT technology and a real estate developer and that his plans are divided into two industrial and commercial areas, but critics say Bezos’ plan is not new at all. For more information, please click here .