Our destination is in the stars, but to travel to them we need to create habitats in space, colonies in space, cities in space, and there is a study that scientists have done at the University of Rochester in New York using principles of physics and engineering. where they have come to the conclusion that to build cities in space, the ideal would be to work with asteroids.
Right now there are companies like Elon Musk's SpaceX, and Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin that are studying the construction of space facilities, space bases, colonies on Mars, as Spacex has projected for example.
Aerospace companies are working on this matter, but what about cities in space, would they be possible, would there be a future for humans beyond Earth, to achieve that, we would need habitats designed with materials and we would need to extract those materials from somewhere, that is why these researchers believe that the target place would be asteroids and it is not a mere fantasy, researchers from the University of Rochester have raised this question in a work that they themselves are worth qualifying as tremendously theoretical textually, but they have published it in the frontiers of astronomy and space sciences magazine.
It is a work that explores the frontiers of the future world, these are questions that we will ask ourselves sooner or later, if cities can be built in space, can they be built based on the knowledge of engineering and technology that we currently have, could they be built using the materials of asteroids, well perhaps yes. In fact, this work is not the first to be done on this subject, the first scientific one is from 1972, which was commissioned by NASA to the physicist Gerard K. O'Neill and his team designed a Special habitat that allows humans to live in space, they called it O'Neill cylinders which are rotating space metropolises.
The O'Neill tube or O'Neill cylinder basically consists of two cylinders that rotate in opposite directions with a rod connecting the cylinders at each end, that would be the basic model, but then it has been complicated and expanded, the basics it is also that the cylinders would rotate fast enough to provide artificial gravity on their inner surface, but slow enough that the people living in them would not experience motion sickness.
The Medina station from the expansion, the Amazon television series, is an O'Neill cylinder and the Cooper station from the movie Interstellar is also a cylinder, both Jeff Bezos and Elons have made reference to these O'Neill cylinders in their visions of future space habitats, however, while O'Neill cylinders offer a solution to the lack of gravity in space, getting the necessary construction materials from Earth into space to create O'Neill cylinders would be difficult and expensive for it leaves the universe of science and enters the universe of the absurd, because these cylinders are enormous, so profitable cylinders can be created, the answer from the Rochester researchers is yes, but taking advantage of those floating islands and mountains that rotate in around the sun and what we call asteroids.
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