Hey I'm just thinking this through, but wouldn't you get atmospheric disturbances with a cylinder of not-gigantic size? Air currents that go antispinwise would experience lift due to coriolis effect, while air currents going spinwise would experience a downdraft. Would that not lead to the development of sideways tornadoes? Just a thought.. The ring or cylinder might have to have a really large circumference to avoid those kinds of things.
Space Colony Art from the 1970s
131–135 of 135 posts
Re: Space Colony Art from the 1970s
#132There’s an under appreciated problem with spinning space stations: they would be set off balance by uneven distribution of weight around the ring. This would make small scale rings a bit problematic because people and stuff need to move around. Rings the size of halo would have enough mass that the movement of people wouldn’t be enough to matter.
An issue with larger rings is that the downforce felt around the ring would vary based on your position within a segment. While it would be a more subtle gradient than a smaller ring, and so less nauseating, it would mean that living and working space would vary in terms of perceived gravity. Another problem is transportation, with the fastest way to cross the ring being across a “spoke” with a gravitational gradient…
And if you got in a car and drove against the direction of spin you would become lighter. While if you went with the direction of spin you would become heavier.
Re: Space Colony Art from the 1970s
#133Some of these arise from of Gerard O’Neill work on space colonies. I saw these in National Geographic in the late 70s they were hugely inspirational to me. Note while Musk advocates settling Mars Bezos has indicated a preference for space colonies such as O’Neills. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/O%27Neill_cylinder
Dreams of Elysian Fields. None of these Arks are going to support billions.
Found comment via CMD-F for "ely" - because these pics look a LOT like what is depicted in the film "Elysium". I do not recommend it, FWIW :P
Re: Space Colony Art from the 1970s
#134Oh man - I feel a lot of history with these images - they actually inspired one of the first online businesses I tried to make. I wanted to put one of these images on my wall, but they were niche enough that I couldn't find anybody selling them. I printed one myself using Zazzle, but then I started thinking that it would be cool to create a place where anybody could share cool niche images they found and have them au…
Want to expand to European market? :)
Haha, I just need to add a country selector to the order form. I can do that in the next couple of days :)
Re: Space Colony Art from the 1970s
#135Many of those images were also published in O'Neill's book, The High Frontier: Human Colonies in Space: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_High_Frontier:_Human_Colon...