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Living in outer space外太空生活
Back to the future回到未來
Jeff Bezos’s ambition to colonise space is straight from the 1970s
傑夫·貝佐斯的太空殖民壯志直接承襲自上世紀 70 年代
IT WAS MORE interesting than another quarterly business update. On May 9th Jeff Bezos, the boss of Amazon, had his coming-out party as a space cadet. Mr Bezos, who is the world’s richest man, has long been interested in using his fortune to advance the cause of space flight. His private rocketry firm, Blue Origin, was founded in 2000. But he has been less of a publicity seeker than Elon Musk, the founder of SpaceX and the world’s best-known enthusiast for outer space.
這可比發布又一季的財報有意思。5 月 9 日，亞馬遜的老闆傑夫·貝佐斯作為太空 探索界的新人首次正式「亮相」。這位世界首富早就有志於用自己的財富推動航天 事業。他的私人火箭公司藍色起源（Blue Origin）成立於 2000 年。但他沒有 SpaceX 的創始人、也是最出名的外太空愛好者伊隆·馬斯克那麼好出風頭。
No longer. During an hour-long presentation, Mr Bezos introduced Blue Origin’s prototype lunar lander, a machine that could be ready, he said, to meet America’s ambitions to return to the Moon by 2024. More striking were his plans for the farther future. Mr Musk wants humans to colonise Mars as an insurance policy should anything happen to Earth. Mr Bezos has no interest in Mars, or indeed any other planet in the solar system, all of which (except Earth) are pretty inhospitable places. Instead, he thinks humans should build their new space-going homes from scratch.
現在不是了。在一個小時的演講中，貝佐斯介紹了藍色起源研發的月球登陸器原型機。他說這臺機器將準備就緒，實現美國在 2024 年重返月球的雄心。更驚人 的是他對更遙遠未來的計劃。馬斯克希望人類殖民火星，作為地球發生災難後的 退路。貝佐斯對火星或太陽系中的任何其他行星都沒興趣。既然所有那些行星（地球除外）基本都不適宜人類居住，他認為人類應該從零開始建造新的太空家園。
The idea is not new. Mr Bezos studied at Princeton, and one of his professors was Gerard O』Neill, a physicist. In 1976 O』Neill published 「The High Frontier」, a bestselling book in which he sketched out the basic engineering principles of how such space habitats might work. It was exactly those sorts of habitat that Mr Bezos advocated as the way humans would live in the future.
他的構想並不新鮮。他曾在普林斯頓大學求學，他的一位教授是物理學家傑拉德·奧尼爾（Gerard O』Neill）。1976 年，奧尼爾出版了暢銷書《太空殖民地》（The High Frontier），概述了這類太空棲息地將可能如何運作的基本工程原理。貝佐斯倡導的人類未來的生活方式和奧尼爾描繪的那類棲息地一模一樣。
O』Neill’s book offered three shapes: a cylinder, a pair of cylinders or a torus. All are hollow, with the living surface built on the inside. All rotate, with the centrifugal force felt at the walls standing in for gravity. Sunlight provides both energy—through solar panels—and illumination, thanks to a system of mirrors and windows. And all are on a heroic scale. The biggest are tens of kilometres long and have enough living room for millions of people.
奧尼爾在書中給出了三種形狀的棲息地：圓柱體、一對圓柱體，或一個圓環體。它們都是中空的，生活區建在內部。不管哪種形狀都要旋轉，通過離心力在內壁模擬重力。陽光通過太陽能電池板提供能源，並通過鏡子和窗戶系統提供照明。所有棲息地都規模巨大。最大的長數十公裡，可容納數百萬人。
Florentine renaissance佛羅倫斯的復興
For that reason, they would have to be built by a species that had already mastered space travel, using resources harvested from the asteroid belt (like Mr Musk, Mr Bezos hopes to drive down the cost of space flight as a first step). They would be strange places to live. The land would curve visibly up the sides of the structure. The superstructure of the habitat would arch across the 「sky」. And rotation is not a perfect substitute for gravity, so moving objects would behave oddly, particularly if the habitat were small. But, said Mr Bezos, they also offer several advantages. Climates could be engineered (「Maui on its best day, all year long」). The best bits of Earth could be replicated elsewhere (one of his illustrations, shown above, depicted a space-going version of Florence).
這樣的太空棲息地必須由已經掌握太空旅行的物種利用從小行星帶收集的資源 來建造（和馬斯克一樣，貝佐斯希望首先降低太空飛行的成本）。在這樣的棲息地生活將是完全陌生的體驗。地面將沿棲息地兩側明顯彎曲，棲息地的上部結構將橫架在「天空」上。旋轉的離心力無法完美替代重力，因此物體移動的情形會很 奇怪，特別是如果棲息地很小的話。但貝佐斯說，這些棲息地也有其優點。這裡 可以人工調節氣候（「全年都能有毛伊島上最好的天氣」）。地球上最好的地方可 以在其他地方重現（貝佐斯的一幅示意圖描繪了太空版的佛羅倫斯，見上圖）。
Their biggest advantage, though, is the sheer amount of living space they would create. Mr Bezos’s ultimate justification for pursuing such megaprojects is his worry about the mismatch between the exponential process of population growth and the finiteness of Earth’s resources. He gave the example of energy demand, which, he says, has historically grown by around 3% a year. He argues that if this were to continue, Earth would, in a couple of centuries, need to be covered completely by solar panels. With the resources of the solar system at its command, however, and thousands of habitats scattered through space, the human population could comfortably grow to a trillion or more.
但這些棲息地最大的優勢是它們能創造出巨大的生活空間。貝佐斯追求這些大型項目的最根本理由是擔心地球有限的資源無法支撐指數級的人口增長。他以能源需求為例，指出能源需求以每年約 3%的速度增長。他認為，如果以這樣的速度 繼續下去，幾個世紀後地球就需要完全被太陽能電池板覆蓋才夠。但是，如果人類掌握了太陽系的資源，有了散布在太空中成千上萬的棲息地，人口可以增長到 萬億甚至更多都沒問題。
Perhaps. It is notable that Mr Bezos’s justifications come from the same era as his proposed solutions. It is a mathematical truism that exponential growth will eventually overwhelm any fixed, finite quantity. Such arguments were most famously applied to natural resources in 「The Limits to Growth」, published by the Club of Rome in 1972. Not so much a bold new future, then, but a blast from the past.
或許是吧。值得注意的是，貝佐斯所說的理由與他提出的解決方案源自相同的時代。指數增長最終將超過任何固定的、有限的量值，這是數學上的老生常談。1972 年智庫羅馬俱樂部（Club of Rome）發表的報告《增長的極限》（The Limits to Growth）用它來論述自然資源的限制，震動世界。所以太空棲息地算不上多大膽的新未來，只是舊事重提。
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