This is a book which arouses great enthusiasm in those who read it. Gerard O'Neill is a brilliant thinker, whose reputation is probably not as great as it should be. 'The High Frontier' is aimed at alerting people to the vast, as-yet-unexploited living space which awaits us elsewhere in our solar system , and at showing us that if we only made the effort, we could take advantage of all those resources right now (and have had this capacity since at least the 70s). It seems to me that the failure of governments and their citizenry to appreciate the importance of this book is an indictment of our lack of vision.

My own gripes aside, O'Neill outlines his project with formidable ingenuity and practicality. He details the logistics of how it might be carried out, describing how rotating cylindrical habitats could be constructed at gravitationally advantageous points around the Earth-Moon system, and, at a later date, farther afield. As Eric Drexler puts it,

"people once saw life in space in terms of planets. They imagined domed cities built on planets, dead planets slowly converted into Earth-like planets, and Earth-like planets reached after years in a flight to the stars. But planets are package deals, generally offering the wrong gravity, atmosphere, length of day, and location."

O'Neill's habitats, on the other hand, would (so far as I can tell, which probably isn't very far) have no such problems. Drexler observes that with just the resources of the asteroids, we would be able to build the practical equivalent of a thousand new Earths.

It is probable that with the emergence of new technologies and ideas, we will do some things differently from how O'Neill envisions them. Even if that is true, though, he gives us a valuable idea: that the massive expansion of our living space need not be confined to science fiction. He estimates that if used to their full, the asteroids alone would provide us with around 3,000 times the living area of the Earth's surface.

It might be argued that using non-terrestrial resources cannot solve our problems; it could also be asserted that the human population will expand to fill the space available to it (since the power of exponential growth is immense). Well, whether the problems of our successors are solved or not, it will certainly not only be via the exploitation of the Solar System's untouched resources. As for the human population filling the space available to it, I have no idea; I can't predict how populations in space will grow or shrink, or even whether intelligent Earthling spacefarers will mostly be human. But for me, the transformation of lifeless matter into intelligence and consciousness has been the greatest thing to happen on Earth; if we can extend the reach of the mind to the entire Solar System, then that seems more than worthwhile.

Read it!

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