Faster, Please! · Economics & Policy
TIER 4 Thu, 30 Apr 2026 15:32:56 +0000
He accepted the Down Wing 1970s diagnosis of humanity's future of overpopulation and scarcity. His Up Wing cure was to leave the planet for Solar System abundance ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ | | ---|---|--- | | | Forwarded this email? Subscribe here for more --- _This is a free edition of_ _**Faster, Please!**_ ,_my regular newsletter about creating a better America and world by accelerating scientific discovery, technological progress, and commercial innovation. (And creating a pro-progress culture.) If you enjoy it and find it helpful in any way, please consider buying a subscription to the twice-weekly regular issues that include in-depth essays, Q &As with smart people, and summaries of relevant news stories. _ Upgrade to paid * * * # 🚀 The high frontiersman: Gerard K. O'Neill ### He accepted the Down Wing 1970s diagnosis of humanity's future of overpopulation and scarcity. His Up Wing cure was to leave the planet for Solar System abundance | | James Pethokoukis --- | Apr 30 --- | --- --- | | | --- | | --- | | --- | | --- | | READ IN APP --- | | ---|---|--- I'm a bit embarrassed to admit that, until recently, nearly everything I knew about Princeton physicist Gerard K. O'Neill came from social-media accounts.¹ These are ones that occasionally post NASA-commission renderings from the 1970s of his concepts for large-scale space habitats. The following two such illustrations depict "Island Three," a third-generation O'Neill space habitat. Each settlement comprises a matched pair of cylinders, roughly 20 miles in length and four miles across. Inside, three long strips of habitable land alternate with three windowed sections, while vast external mirrors regulate sunlight, opening and closing to simulate a terrestrial day-night cycle. | | ---|---|--- | | ---|---|--- Together, the twin cylinders provide about 500 square miles of usable surface--enough, in theory, to accommodate several million residents. O'Neill designed them to spin in opposite directions, a configuration that simplifies orientation and helps keep the structure steadily aligned with the Sun. Even a spherical, first-generation O'Neill habitat concept would qualify as a megaproject. And he imagined many advanced versions built over time, starting at L5--one of the Earth-Moon Lagrange points, where gravity and orbital motion balance to create a stable location in space--eventually forming an ever-expanding network of orbital habitats. Built from lunar and asteroid resources, this web of humanity would spread across the inner Solar System and house millions, potentially billions, of people beyond Earth. Keep in mind that O'Neill believed in the 1970s that humanity already possessed the basic technological capabilities to start building such structures before the end of the 20th century. As O'Neill writes in his 1981 book, _2081 :_ > A Space Colony would be an Earthlike habitat outside Earth's shadow, growing its own food and deriving all its energy from the sun. Solar energy, inexhaustible and ever-present in space, would power its industries. Space colonies would process lunar or asteroidal materials into finished products for the Earth and for other colonies. Unlike the other drivers of change, space colonies are still on the drawing board, not yet realized. Yet I believe they will transform society during the twenty-first century as much as the automobile, airplane, and radio, none of them in existence in 1881, transformed our world during the twentieth. #### A vision of our future O'Neill's best-known work is surely his 1976 book, _The High Frontier: Human Colonies in Space_ , which is devoted to that vision of humanity living off-planet and spreading across the Solar System. But what I like especially about _2081_ is how it gives a more comprehensive vision of a possible future for our species, both out there and down here. A big chunk of the book is devoted to chronicling the adventures of a young man, Eric C. Rawson, as he travels from an asteroid-belt colony to Earth. It's a three-month journey aboard a small cargo-and-passenger ship whose ion drive is powered by a laser beaming from a generator near the sun. Once Rawson arrives at Earth, the spaceship docks at an orbiting transfer station, where he then takes a shuttle down to one of several spaceports at the equator. From there, it's a supersonic jet flight to the Cincinnati airport, then an underground hyperloop to Erie, Pa., and finally a driverless car to the town of Waterford, currently enjoying a Hawaii-like climate under a clear dome due to the winter weather outside. Those are the broad strokes, but O'Neill spends page after page giving a detailed description of what life could be like in the America of 2081, including employment (yes, people still have jobs, at least three days a week), grocery shopping, entertainment, and travel. (Robots handle most of the housework.) For example, this vignette is about Rawson arriving at a relative's house in Waterford: > The house seemed much like those in one of our Polynesian-climate colonies, with plenty of open space, high ceilings, and thick roof beams in natural wood. The floors at the entry level were terra cotta tile, and large windows opened onto courtyards and gardens rich with tropical flowers. We climbed stairs with a carved wooden railing to a carpeted level where Jeannette showed me to my suite, with bedroom, balcony, bath, and exercise room. She showed me the controls for the stereo, the video, and the lights, and added that if I just spoke in a normal tone in any room the house computer would hear me and carry out my instructions. I wasn't at all sure I liked the idea that every word I spoke was being listened to, but it seemed to be the price of perfect service. After she left, there was a gentle knock at the door and I found Arthur outside it waiting with the last of my bags. He explained that he was programmed not to enter a bedroom without permission. He padded off then, descending the stairs a bit slowly and carefully. Half of the nearly 300-page book is that sort of thing. I doubt there's been much published in recent decades that gives such a specific vision of life in the future. And it's a desirable, recognizable life that still has the major components of how we live today, at least the parts that take place on Earth. It's the sort of detailed imagining that we desperately need at a time when too much of our vision of the future is formed by dystopian Hollywood films and AI company CEOs musing about massive unemployment. #### Up Wing solution to a Down Wing diagnosis But that's not my big takeaway here. O'Neill's entire project is an effort at techno-solutionism in response to the neo-Malthusianism of the 1970s: too many people, not enough resources. To be sure, it's a worldview that O'Neill completely accepted. He wasn't some Julian Simon or Herman Kahn making a techno-capitalism driven argument about abundance. He had a totally "limits to growth" diagnosis of the big problems facing humanity. This from _1981_ , written more than a decade after Norman Borlaug won the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts launching the Green Revolution: > "We have a responsibility beyond mere curiosity to learn as much about the future as we can, because we must choose those actions that will insure not only the survival of humanity, but an improvement in its condition. In a world that is growing hungrier year by year we must search for ways to end famine, for as the planetary resources of concentrated energy and materials dwindle, we must either find new inexhaustible resources or - all of us - be content with less." O'Neill accepted the diagnosis that shortages were coming. The prescription was another matter. For neo-Malthusians, the answer was a steady-state world with economic activity and population growth throttled in perpetuity. O'Neill found such a proposed cure to be unacceptably grim. He often pointed to socialist economist Robert Heilbroner, who conceded that holding a society static would be hard to manage without coercion bordering on totalitarianism. The result would look rather a lot like _1984_ or _Brave New World_. Again from _1981_ : > "The catastrophic conclusions of The Limits to Growth study are serious enough, but even more serious are its recommendations: that all of humanity should make the transition to a globally managed static society (the M.I.T. researchers refer to it as a "steady-state" society), in which the individual could only move and use energy and materials within tightly circumscribed limits; those constraints would bind not only those of us alive now, but our descendants to the end of time." #### A way forward The deeper objection was that the steady-state vision fundamentally lacked imagination. Scarcity, in O'Neill's reading, was a geography problem rather than a physical law. Earth was simply the wrong size for the civilization being run on it. So O'Neill saw space as a way to deindustrialize Earth (as does Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos), make room for continued population growth, and tap an effectively infinite supply of materials for humanity's expansion. One theme of my book is that America's postwar techno-optimism, what I call Up Wing 1.0, was showing cracks by the late 1960s and was finished by the early 1970s. Some cooling of the pro-progress impulse was probably inevitable. As incomes rise, people tend to place greater value on their health and the environment. It also was probably more likely than not for this attitude change to curdle into something darker. Influential books gave the fear a scientific and moral frame: _The Population Bomb_ warned of mass famine, _The Limits to Growth_ projected resource exhaustion and collapse. Real-world 1970s shocks--including oil crises and the Great Inflation--drove the point home. Hollywood piled on with _Soylent Green_ and the rest, making a future of decline feel like the default.² But as O'Neill's thinking shows, there was another path, one that also ensured civilizational freedom. (No, not my preferred path, exactly--mine would have had better national leadership rejecting neo-Malthusian thinking outright as bad science and bad economics. America would have kept exploring space, building nuclear reactors, and investing heavily in science--oh, and pushed back hard against the expanding regulatory state.) And a journey along that path, driven by a belief in the power of man's mind to solve problems, means we would be far further along to an Up Wing world that looks a lot like the one O'Neill imagined. Upgrade to paid Share 1 I highly recommend the 2021 documentary, _The High Frontier: The Untold Story of Gerard K. O'Neill._ 2 That Down Wing foundation reshaped policy, culture, and expectations in ways that still echo today. It encouraged a precautionary mindset--"better safe than sorry"--that slows or blocks big projects, from power generation and transmission to AI data centers. * * * **On sale everywhere** _**The Conservative Futurist: How To Create the Sci-Fi World We Were Promised**_ | | ---|---|--- You're currently a free subscriber to Faster, Please!. For the full experience, upgrade your subscription. Upgrade to paid --- | | | Like --- | | Comment --- | | Restack --- (C) 2026 James Pethokoukis 548 Market Street PMB 72296, San Francisco, CA 94104 Unsubscribe