How Would You Envision a Space Colony? | Short Film Showcase
What if you lived in the 1500s and you knew there was a guy named Sir Jeffrey Bezos and Sir Elon Musk, and you knew they were building what they were going to call Mayfl flowers? These May flowers were going to be able to take people to new worlds. How would you prepare the people who are going to ride in those boats so they could survive and thrive on the other end? Within 20 years, we believe somebody is going to step off of a spaceship onto the surface of a world, and that that person is going to go there to stay, and we want that person to be you.
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This stuff right here, right? So when you see this stuff, what do you think? Yeah, I mean, I think I wish I had done that. This is Rick Tumlinson, a self-described space activist and one of Congress's go-to guys for space-related matters. He recently put on the New Worlds Conference, an event for the people who he believes will be the next generation of pioneers.
What we're doing is an experiment. At the core of what we're doing is a serious discussion on the technologies, the engineering, policies, things like that that we're going to need to settle space. And then we're wrapping that in a larger cultural overlay that includes art, music, and philosophy. It's not about the machines; it's not about the engineering; it's about the people.
"How you doing man? What do you got going on?"
"Well, just showing a really smart people have been having serious conversations about colonizing space for a long time. It all started with this guy named Gerard K. O'Neal, who wrote a landmark book called The High Frontier. That was the book that changed everything because Dr. O'Neal said in that book you don't have to be NASA to be involved in space. He said you could go out into space, use the principles of free enterprise, harvest the resources of space, and create a new frontier. You can do it."
And he didn't just write a book about it and then go, you know, I wrote the book. He formed an organization and started having conferences to bring people together to share that dream and inspire each other as a group.
"When it comes to this conference, I want to create a vision in people's minds of a credible future in which they can live out their hopes, their dreams, their desires. If you open the frontier, it becomes all about possibility. An infinite array of possible futures that we get to choose."
This planet, this amazing, in some ways, new worlds is like your average conference. You got your keynote addresses, your expert panels, your networking events. But there are two things that make New Worlds really unique. The first is a sort of weird science rave, which we'll come back to. And the second is an emphasis on kids.
"So just don't look in the camera, okay? So I'm FIS Whitney, and I love doing like sorts of programming things. I started programming a couple years ago when I got a Raspberry Pi, just a little computer. The premise of The Institute is that within 20 years, the first human beings are going to be stepping on the moon, or Mars, or into a colony in space with the intention of living there."
"So if you're looking at a 20-year window, these kids are going to be the people doing it. But what I did here in this presentation, I basically just created a movie. So what I did is I built this 3D model in Minecraft, so it's showing a 3D model of the space station or whatever you want to call it, a free space colony. I'll just start this off."
"These two right here are your apartment buildings; here's the farm. We use hydroponics with gel, and we get the fertilizer which we make on Earth and just have it delivered there. The main focus for me was the artificial gravity and transportation. You do the different floors from the space station, and now it's just a little rocket that'll go off and get supplies and come back. And that's basically the agriculture area where you're growing trees and plants and crops and food and stuff."
"Do you ever think of this conference? You could have the next Melin or Columbus or Neil Armstrong or is that too grand?"
"No, not at all, but I would rather have the first person whose name you don't remember that built a cabin and started a farm. Okay, the ones who don't get named, you know, the ones who actually build the communities. Okay, we call them settlers, right? And they could be here. I think they’re probably."
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"Are my hair up to prepare for a space-themed show? We get the proper props. We brought a lot of fans that look like fire and star-like fans with stars on it and stuff, and we're using our LED hoops.
Okay, so now on to the rave that I told you about. Yes, those are Tesla coils shooting electricity at dancers in a cage. And yes, that is Rick getting his groove on. But it's not just that he loves dancing in giant Tesla coils; he's actually got a pretty interesting reason for the concert."
"What we're talking about here is not just technology and engineering; we're talking about creating new culture, right? It has to be a culture that celebrates the future. It has to be a culture that celebrates that we're taking on the impossible, and we're going to make it possible. Every major cultural movement in history has had its tribal dances, has had its celebration, has had its ability to just let its hair down and go crazy, right? So you dance around the fire at night after you've fought the dragons during the day."
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"So I get it. All this new world stuff sounds a little bit crazy, but maybe they're on to something. I'm sure Jobs and Wozniak looked a little bit crazy building computers in their garage. Could Rick and these kids and these dancers be people who end up changing the world? It only takes a few people to change the future. You know there were only a few people on those first ships that came to the new worlds over here. There were only a few people that ever changed anything.
It's never the mass that changes the future; it's always a small group of people that identifies and trailblazes new ideas, new philosophies, and new approaches to tomorrow. What if in the future, a child could grow up in a world and look up in the sky and see these little dots of light going out and be a part of a civilization whose goal is to expand life to worlds that are now dead?
What I want to see is humanity beginning to reach the capabilities and possibilities that we all know in our heart we can. That's powerful.
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