Humans could live on giant orbs floating in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter for the next 15 years.
This is the bonkers claim made by scientist Pekka Janhunen, who says millions of people could inhabit a megacity in space by 2026.
Dr. Janhunen, an astrophysicist at the Finnish Meteorological Institute in Helsinki, described his vision in a research paper published this month.
He established the plan for the “megasatellites” floating around the dwarf planet Ceres, located approximately 325 million miles from Earth.
“The motivation is to have a settlement with artificial gravity that allows for growth beyond the habitable zone of the Earth,” Dr. Janhunen wrote.
The vast majority of plots to establish distant worlds revolve around the Moon or Mars. This is largely due to its proximity to Earth.
Dr. Janhunen’s proposal, on the other hand, seems a little more advanced.
Its disk-shaped habitat had thousands of cylindrical structures, with a home of more than 50,000 people.
These pods would be joined by powerful magnets and generate artificial gravity by rotating slowly.
Residents would extract resources from Ceres 600 miles below the settlement and transport them with “space elevators,” Dr. Janhunen said.
“Lifting Ceres materials is energetically cheap compared to transforming them into habitats, if a space elevator is used,” he wrote.
“Because Ceres has little gravity and rotates relatively fast, the space elevator is doable.”
Ceres, the largest object in the asteroid belt, is the best destination for settlements outside the world because of its nitrogen-rich atmosphere, Dr. Janhunen added.
This would allow settlers to more easily create Earth-like conditions than those that colonize the hardest, carbon-rich environment on Mars.
This does not solve the threats of rogue asteroids or space radiation, although Dr. Janhunen, who worked with several Finnish researchers in the newspaper, has also thought so.
He proposed that the giant, cylindrical mirrors placed around the megasatellite could protect it from any kind of bombing.
These mirrors would also focus sunlight on the habitat for the growth of crops and other plants.
It sounds pretty pink, but Dr. Janhunen also highlighted several issues with the plans.
On the one hand, there is the not-so-small hurdle of people really flying to Ceres.
NASA sent an investigation into it in 2015, a journey that took eight years, too long to keep hundreds of people using current technology.
Dr. Janhunen also admitted that the energy needed to elevate Ceres ’building materials into orbit would be a major hurdle.
The research was published on January 6 in the preprinted journal Archive. Scientists have not yet been peer-reviewed.