Space Settlements on Drastic Environments

 Will Langston

I have been doing some research on our culture's vision of outer space and what are the ways in which we think about settlements. When people think of living in outer space they automatically think of these crazy giant scale settlements. These preconceived notions have no history and are defined by unprecedented plans that seemingly have no correlation between how humans want to live and of outer space living. 

Looking at works of Fred Scharmen, it is clear there are 3 main types of audiences that some of the works or visionary outer space planning can reach. 

He talks about the “Big science, technical audience. Pop culture visionary futurist audience. Post counter cultural audience.” 

It is very clear that the works he talks about have an intention of creating settlements that are not dependent on planets. Studying works that instead create these wheels that are miles long that can home up to 1 million people. 




I think it is interesting to create drawings like these. But instead. I think I would want my audience to be a mix of people that are interested in environmental conditions as well as the pop culture visionary audience. Because I was doing research on how we would try to build on mars, and there were findings that mars atmosphere is so thin, that the highs and lows of the temperatures between night time and day time are 50x more extreme than the hottest deserts on earth during the day, and as cold as the Antarctic during the night. 

Being able to control conditions like this with buildings and environments on other planets is really something I am interested in. Also, exploring more extreme environments that don’t even exist yet. Potentially studying how undiscovered planets with oceans react to the different gravitational pulls, and building structures that could challenge extreme waves, or harness the power of them to create energy. 

When thinking of building on different planets, we automatically think of mars settlements. While this could be interesting to explore, I think I want to study environments that we have to discover. How would we begin to build on a gas giant, an ice planet, an ocean-planet, etc…




 


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