Featured on PDR in the collection Space Colony Art from the 1970s

In “The Colonization of Space”, his 1974 essay for Physics Today, Princeton professor of physics Gerard K. O’Neill (1927–1992) wrote that the key for extraterrestrial habitation is “to treat the region beyond Earth not as a void but as a culture medium, rich in matter and energy”. Were construction to commence shortly, he predicted “nearly all our industrial activity could be moved away from Earth’s fragile biosphere within less than a century from now”. Rather than terraforming Mars, or settling the jungles of Jupiter, O’Neill proposed constructing habitable cylinders — modifications of the environments first designed by John Desmond Bernal in 1929 — that would spin on their axes through space, simulating Earth’s gravity and using a system of mirrors and apertures to approximate tellurian…