Last week, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos revealed his spaceship company's new lunar lander, dubbed Blue Moon, and he spelled out a bold and broad vision for humanity's future in space. Faced with the limits of resources here on Earth, most fundamentally energy, he pointed to life in space as a solution.
"If we move out into the solar system, for all practical purposes, we have unlimited resources," Bezos said. "We could have a trillion people out in the solar system."
And while colonies on other planets would be plagued by low gravity, long distances to Earth (leading to communication delays), and further limits down the road, those weaknesses are avoided if the colonies remain truly in space. To that end, Bezos instead suggested people consider taking up residence in O’Neill colonies, a futuristic concept for space settlements first dreamed up decades ago.
"These are very large structures, miles on end, ...
