Within the next 15 years, humans could be living on giant spheres floating in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.
That’s the insane claim of top scientist Pekka Janhunen, who says millions of people could be living in a megacity in space by 2026.
Dr. Janhunen, an astrophysicist at the Finnish Meteorological Institute in Helsinki, described his vision in a research article published this month.
He explained the blueprint for floating “megasatellites” around the dwarf planet Ceres, which is about 325 million miles from Earth.
“The motivation is to have an artificial gravity settlement that allows growth beyond Earth’s habitat,” wrote Dr. Janhunen.
The vast majority of plans to establish distant worlds revolve around the Moon or Mars. This is largely due to their proximity to Earth.
Dr Janhunen’s proposal, on the other hand, looks a bit further away.
Its disk-shaped habitat is said to contain thousands of cylindrical structures, each with more than 50,000 people.
Those pods would be connected by powerful magnets and generate artificial gravity by rotating slowly.
Residents would mine resources from Ceres 600 miles below the settlement and haul them back up using “space elevators,” said Dr. Janhunen.
“Lifting the materials from Ceres is energetically cheap compared to processing them into habitats, if using a space elevator,” he wrote.
“Because Ceres has low gravity and rotates relatively quickly, the space elevator is feasible.”
Ceres – the largest object in the asteroid belt – is the best destination for settlements outside the world because of its nitrogen-rich atmosphere, added Dr. Janhunen to it.
This would allow settlers to create Earth-like conditions more easily than those colonizing the heavier, carbon dioxide-rich environment of Mars.
That doesn’t solve the threats from rogue asteroids or space rays, although Dr. Janhunen, who worked on the paper with a number of Finnish researchers, has also thought of that.
He proposed that giant, cylindrical mirrors placed around the megasatellite could protect it from all types of bombing.
Those mirrors would also direct sunlight onto the habitat for crop growth and other plant life.
It all sounds pretty rosy, but Dr. Janhunen also pointed out a number of problems with the plans.
First, there’s the not-so-minor hurdle of actually flying people to Ceres.
NASA sent a probe there in 2015, a journey that took a whopping eight years – far too long to support hundreds of people using current technology.
Dr. Janhunen also admitted that the energy required to move building materials from Ceres to orbit would be a major obstacle.
The research was published Jan. 6 in the pre-print journal Arxiv. It has not yet been peer-reviewed by scientists.