David Kipping

They will have to be harvesting energy from afar.

They will have to be doing work on that energy outside of their planet, because otherwise you're going to dramatically change the environment in which you live.

Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of fun ideas here.

One of the classic ideas is an O'Neill cylinder or a Stanford torus.

These are like two rotating structures that were devised in space.

They're basically using the centrifugal force as artificial gravity.

And so these are structures which tend to be many kilometers across that you're building in space, but could potentially habitat millions of people in orbit of the Earth.

Of course, you could imagine the Expanse does a pretty good job, I think, of exploring the idea of human exploration of the solar system and having many objects, many of the small near-Earth objects and asteroids inhabited by mining colonies.

One of the ideas we've played around with our group is this technology called a quasite.

A quasite is

An extension, again, we always tend to extend previous ideas.

Ideas build upon ideas.

An extension idea called a statite.

A statite was an idea proposed, I think, by Ron Forward in the 1970s.

1970s seemed to have all sorts of wacky ideas.

I don't know what was going on then.

I think the Stanford Taurus, the O'Neill Cylinder, statites, the gravitational lens, people were really having fun with dreaming about space in the 70s.

The statite is basically a solar sail, but it's such an efficient solar sail that the outward force of radiation pressure equals the inward force of gravity from the Sun, and so it doesn't need to orbit.

Normally you avoid, the sun is pulling us right now through force of gravity, but we are not getting closer towards the sun, even though we are falling towards the sun because we're in orbit, which means our translational speed is just enough to keep us at the same altitude essentially from the sun.

And so you're in orbit, and that's how you maintain distance.