Permanent Space Colonies: Humanity's Rite of Passage

Princeton physicist Gerard O'Neill helped to kick-start the space colonies movement during the 1970's. Stewart Brand of the Coevolution Quarterly, was another driving force for the space colonies movement, and edited a book on space settlements that is available online. NASA also did several studies on space settlements, including the original 1975 design study that is available online in ebook form.

Several private grassroots organisations were founded during that magical time of citizen space enthusiasm. Some of the best known included the L5 Society, Permanent, Artemis, and TMP/LUF, discussed in a previous posting here at Al Fin.

NASA maintains an excellent site dealing with space settlements resources, organisations, and links, here. Wikipedia's Space Colonization site is a good complement to the NASA site, with fine links to resources.

Humans will still be in their childhood, until they learn to live off-planet. Sea-steads and under-sea communities will be important rites of passage for humans, but only permanent space colonies will truly mark the passage to adulthood of the species.

The natural human trait is to concentrate on the disaster du jour, or the local cause, fad, or fashion--and forget that dinosaurs were once the top pedestal species, like humans are now. But somewhere out there in the Oort Cloud, the Kuiper Belt, the Asteroid Belt, the Earth Crossing Asteroids, or even interstellar space--there is a large fast moving object with the Earth's name on it. When that hunk of matter hits this planet, that will be all she wrote, folks. Being natural is not going to help humans survive. Growing up is dangerous. Never growing up is a dead end.