An island in space waiting to happen

~ image ~ Sedja hovers above a rather large model of an island in space

Would you like to live among the stars?

In the early 1970s the Princeton physics professor, Gerard K. O'Neill, worked out a way for any number of people to live and work in space.

A rather neat model of O'Neill's vision, made by Jimbo Perhaps, can be found at the Space Studies Institute island, not far from their landing place ~ just fly up.

The model of the island that could have been built in space, using resources from the Moon and asteroids, would have been ten kilometres long and the home of a million people.

The island in space would be like living on Earth, as an Earth-like gravity would be generated by rotation ~ and this model is rotating.

O'Neill estimated that the Asteroid Belt alone had enough raw material to build islands in space with a total land area equivalent to 3,000 Earths.

If the dinosaurs had woken up to this potential, they might still be around, looking down on us.