Space Colony Art from the 1970s
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Space Colony Art from the 1970s
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Re: Space Colony Art from the 1970s
#2The torus design really makes it so that it's uphill both ways. That would change the "Back in my day" jokes forever.
Re: Space Colony Art from the 1970s
#3Those "real" painted pictures give me always a kind of warm feeling compared to the sharp digital paintings.
But it may have been caused by all that SciFi covers I've seen as a child.
Re: Space Colony Art from the 1970s
#4Many of these pictures are based on designs described in one of my favorite books of all time, The High Frontier, by Gerard K. O'Neil.
In it, O'Neil, a Princeton physicist and founder of the Space Studies Institute, goes on to describe in great technical detail the feasibility of building artificial space habitats of varying sizes. I heartily recommend it to anyone even remotely interested in space. The ideas from this book have been implemented in countless fictional universes[1], so you may find that you've seen them before.
It all started here in this excellent book.
Re: Space Colony Art from the 1970s
#5Slideshow mirror: http://imgur.com/a/eus5K
Re: Space Colony Art from the 1970s
#6I believe that "Toroidal Colonies" inspired heavily the movie Elysium (2013)
Re: Space Colony Art from the 1970s
#7I remember some of these, which were reprinted in magazines like Odyssey (and maybe even Omni?) in the 70s and 80s. The images, along with colony/exploration books by Larry Niven, Ben Bova, and James P. Hogan, really had the power to set one's imagination on fire.
Re: Space Colony Art from the 1970s
#8Many of these pictures are based on designs described in one of my favorite books of all time, The High Frontier , by Gerard K. O'Neil. In it, O'Neil, a Princeton physicist and founder of the Space Studies Institute, goes on to describe in great technical detail the feasibility of building artificial space habitats of varying sizes. I heartily recommend it to anyone even remotely interested in space. The ideas from t…
I liked http://www.nss.org/settlement/ColoniesInSpace/ better as a book, though of course O'Neill had more authority.
Re: Space Colony Art from the 1970s
#9I believe that "Toroidal Colonies" inspired heavily the movie Elysium (2013) http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1535108/
My thought too. There are some really nice renderings here: https://www.solidangle.com/news/elysium/
Re: Space Colony Art from the 1970s
#10Many of these pictures are based on designs described in one of my favorite books of all time, The High Frontier , by Gerard K. O'Neil. In it, O'Neil, a Princeton physicist and founder of the Space Studies Institute, goes on to describe in great technical detail the feasibility of building artificial space habitats of varying sizes. I heartily recommend it to anyone even remotely interested in space. The ideas from t…
They're also featured heavily in T.A. Heppinheimer's Colonies in Space, now available in full text online:
http://www.nss.org/settlement/ColoniesInSpace/index.html
That featured strongly in my childhood imagination. I'm no longer the technotopian I was at the time, but it's a powerful vision. Much of what it (and O'Neil) promoted should have been done by now were it possible.