This material is provided as a public service to support the student Space Settlement Contest. The views expressed herein are not necessarily those of NASA or any other government body.
The painting of the interior of a "Model III" cylindrical Space Colony by Don Davis appears on the cover of Space Colonies. It has inspired more belief and roused more ire than any other artifact associated with Space Colonies so far. The man-made idyll is too man-made, too idylliic or too ecologically unlikely - say the ired. It's a general representation of the natural scale of life attainable in a large rotating environment - say the inspired. Either way, it makes people jump.
-SB (Stewart Brand)
I f you are a regular CQ subscriber you'll be glad to know that about 20% - some 32 pages - of this book is brand new (1977) material which hasn't appeared in the magazine and won't This includes most of the book reviews, the Governor Jerry Brown material, two Eric Drexler articles, and the two most recent interviews with Space Colony designer Gerard O'Neill and astronaut Russell Schweickart.
The book is organized into three sections - Vision, Debate, and Space. The Vision is Gerard O'Neill's domain - progressing from broad propaganda to technical details to anecdotes. The Debate section is probably the most unique to this book since no one else has published the highly intelligent attacks that have been stung into life by the Space Colony idea. And the third section -Space - is natural history, accounts from people such as astronaut Schweickart and space scientist Sagan and politician Brown. Finishing, if you please, on a note of reality.
By the way, "co-evolution" is a term of recent coinage, co-conceived by biologists Paul Ehrlich and Peter Raven to explain something terribly obvious but not before formally recognized about living organisms They spend most of their adaptive effort getting along with other life which is likewise busily competing, cooperating, and avoiding at them. Life co-evolves with life. That includes us. So as you study your work, your yard, your watershed, your big - community and human community, your weather, your access to tools, your night sky, and your prospects in Space, be aware that they are studying you.
-SB
