Colonization of Trans-Neptunian Objects
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Freeman Dyson has proposed that Trans-Neptunian Objects, rather than planets, are the major potential habitat of life in space. Several trillion comet-like ice-rich bodies exist outside the orbit of Neptune, in the Kuiper Belt and Oort Cloud. These may contain all the ingredients for life (water ice, ammonia, and carbon-rich compounds), including significant amounts of deuterium and helium-3.
Colonists of such bodies could build rotating habitats or live in dug-out spaces and light them with fusion reactors for thousands to millions of years before moving on.[1] Dyson and Carl Sagan envisioned that humanity could migrate to neighbouring star systems, which have similar clouds, by using natural objects as slow interstellar vessels with substantial natural resources; and that such interstellar colonies could also serve as way-stations for faster, smaller interstellar ships.
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[edit] References
- ^ Carl E. Sagan, "Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space", Random House, 1994.
- Freeman Dyson, "The World, the Flesh, and the Devil", Third J.D. Bernal Lecture, May 1972, reprinted in Communication with Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Carl Sagan, ed., MIT Press, 1973, ISBN 0-262-69037-3
- Richard P. Terra, "Islands in the Sky: Human Exploration and Settlement of the Oort Cloud", in Islands in the Sky: Bold New Ideas for Colonizing Space, Stanley Schmidt and Robert Zubrin, eds. Wiley, 1996, ISBN 0-471-13561-5
- Ben R. Finney and Eric M. Jones, eds., Interstellar Migration and the Human Experience, University of California Press, 1986, ISBN 0-520-05898-4
- Carl E. Sagan, "Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space", Random House, 1994.
- David G. Stephenson, "Comets and Interstellar Travel", in Journal of the British Interplanetary Society, 36, 1983, pp. 210-214.
