Just amazing!

This has got to be one of the coolest renderings of the O'Neill colonies that I've ever seen. Maybe the best one that's ever existed! Thank you for letting us see what your interpretation of the perfect future is!

I’d like to see a movie set on one of these. The whole plot of the movie would play out inside the station and the fact that it was taking place on a giant rotating space cylinder wouldn’t even matter. But you’d see it in the background. The actual story could be a love story, or a murder mystery, or a comedy, etc.

I am 100% sure, if we become space faring we will live in these one day and they will become increasingly larger. People tell me it will be impossible for people to build things this size but I tell them who said anything about people building them, we build the machines that will build them.

While there's a practical limit to how thick you can make these, there's no real limit to how long they can be. Imagine it, a river valley that encircles a star

Finally someone doing an animation of what it would look like on the ground in an O'Neal Sphere! Excellent!!! Don't forget the low gravity recreation center at the ends with curved pools.

I always have trouble imaging the scale of megastructures, this was a big help, thx.

You should forward a link to this to Denis Villeneuve. Word is that after Dune, he plans on his next movie (or the one after) being Arthur C. Clarke's Rama, which is an Oneill like cylinder.

Lovely work. I grew up dreaming of living in those 1970's renders of O'Neill colonies and Stanford Rings, this does a great job of bringing back those dreams.

I personally feel like it's a privilege to be able to view things that are possible in a huge amount of detail. Just 30 years ago this wouldn't even be possible to look at lol. Hopefully we build this and throw money out of the equation.

The best visualisation of the megastructure I have ever seen. What's impressive that you somehow managed to make it feel nice and pleasant to live in. Most other visualisations tend to make them claustrophobic and uninviting :D

I want to live in one of these so badly, but I've surrendered to the fact that such a marvel of engineering will not happen sooner than my natural exit. A recreation in a VR game has been scratching that itch quite nicely though so not all is entirely glum.

Love it! Just one small critisism, why are there cars in this thing? Given their size and relative flatness noting inside it would be more than an hour away by bike, add in some high speed trams for longer trips and your done. Why waste so much of your valuable space building such wide roads?

I can think of one more issue that the builders of an O'Neill habitat will have to consider: our species circadian rhythm. I visited Iceland in early December last year, and got chatting to a very nice American lady who had settled there. During our conversation, she remarked that the biggest problem with an Icelandic summer was the fact it was difficult to sleep during the 'night' as even the thickest of blackout curtains didn't quite block out the midnight sun when pulled. Whilst the town she lived in didn't get twenty four hour daylight, it was far north enough not to get properly dark in summer, either, and even the Icelanders have issues getting to sleep at 'night' in Summer... The light beam running along the longitudinal axis would cause the same issue, and it can't be solved by just switching it off for twelve or so hours. I would assume that some kind of shield or shadow producing device would have to be installed between the light beam and the sides of the habitat to cast a strong enough shadow to give 'night-time'. It most likely would have to rotate in the opposite direction to the habitat to be most effective. If seasonal type light variations were required, the shield would have to have some kind of capacity to widen or narrow as needed, and if the architects and builders wanted different sections to experience different seasons at different times, the shielding would need to be separated into however many sections required, each with their own program for expansion and contraction...

This is one of the most beautiful videos I have ever seen. I have loved the concept of O'Niell Cylinders for several years but this has to be the best rendition of them that I've come across. This video is truly a gift and a service to humanity as it truly shows a glimpse of what humanity is really capable of if we live up to our highest potential. Thank you for creating this.

This makes me wonder ... if it might be easier to build advanced high-tech societies from scratch in Space, than to attempt to radically transform and uplift existing old-tech societies on Earth.

Amazing. Makes me want to live there!

This was awesome. Been on an O'Neill binge recently so this came at just the right time

Thank you for the envisioning that you gifted us with this,because its completely amazing to say the least.

Please do more of the O Neil colonies (maybe a McKendree cylinder next?), I love these!

I miss this kind of representation of a space station in movies and TV series. They always do the same things. It's not a lack of 3D technology or budget. It's just a lack of interest. To date, we've only seen anything close to this in Elysium and The Expanse, or excellent independent works like this

Absolutely awesome

Excellent work! 👍👍

stunning!

Nice work, Mark! I really enjoyed this.👍 I also like your decision to have a solid hull and not use huge amounts of glass. Interestingly, this seems to be the direction that most recent space colony studies are going towards. Fraser Cain, who runs the great astronomy and space exploration website UniverseToday, also has a great channel here on KZfaq. Recently, he interviewed a scientist whose proposal is to build a colony with a rubble-pile asteroid like Bennu. Basically, you would puta giant “bag” around it and the spin it to shape the rubble into a cylindrical shape. That cylindrical rubble pile would then be molded into the colony’s hull. A solid hull would also be much better at protecting the inhabitants from harmful cosmic radiation.

A series of videos showing the construction sequence would be great. Design, orbital construction infrastructure (planet side and in space), smelting, fabrication, assembly, powerplant, fit out etc.

Great video man! With iron nitride magnets I think we might be closer to this than most people might think.

Stunning work! This is what I dream of when I think of the future, I hope we can make it there.

This seems more pratical, giving way more useable surface area, but i kind of grew accustomed to and like the look of the 3 rows of glass panes opposite the strips of land.

Beautiful!

Great work! I have been wanting to see a visualization like this forever, really love the groundwork you set for your interpretation of this megastructure. NOW SHOW ME YOUR DYSON SPHERE

Fantastic work-very inspiring!

A truly fascinating video. Well done!

At "only" 35 km long, 800 km/h vacuum trains don't really make sense. Modern transit technology would just do fine. Good work on the visuals though - the world needs more space habitat art! And even if a couple details don't make sense, it's good to have a futuristic sense of imagination. ^_^

Stunning

Amazing!!!!! Mate you are a genius artist.

Very very nice. Mr. O'Neill would be intrigued at the interest and, no doubt, computer power needed to generate this remarkable work.

In no way do I want to insult the artist for his creation. I have so much input on something like this. -- The beautiful scenery you display here doesn't have to be the only level. There can be levels underneath all of that, and many of them. For example, level -20 is the outermost and has a 1.2g force while the very top level, the park can be a 0.7 or 0.6 g. Having higher g forces can have advantages like launching a satellite or a transport, giving a 10 m/s advantage for free. A park with 0.6g can be quite entertaining.

Wow! This is terrific.

Amazing. I was hoping to make a few simple renders of Hong Kong as an O'Neill cylinder and couldn't even work it out

Awesome video. Thank you for making it. ❤

amazing work!

Amazing animation and modelling. Love the concepts! One suggestion for the future: do a little more post-processing to take it up to cinema level.

Weyland Yutani easter egg was a nice touch

Really well done!!! 🙂

That was awesome! Please make more!

Wow, what an amazing animation. Great music too!! Here's some more ideas if you want to use them... Why not build where the materials and resources are? Its much easier to transport the construction equipment than billions of tons of materials. Most asteroids are carbonaceous with lots of ices (including water), some metals for industry, buildings, and loads of materials for life, they are C-type. The S-type are stony, but still have significant metal deposits, more importantly they have the ingredients to make the billions of tons of basalt fiber needed for a good sized habitat. M-type or X-type are mostly made of metals with some rock as well. They are valuable for building materials. There are other types that are mixtures of the above. Most asteroids at or beyond the orbit of Jupiter have enormous amounts of water and other ices, lots of materials for industry, farming, and life. Probably half of all asteroids less than 6 miles wide (10km) are 'rubble piles' (floating piles of dust, rocks, boulders, etc) which means with almost zero gravity they are ridiculously easy to mine or dig into. One method proposed for hollowing them out is incredibly simple. You make a bag of some reasonably strong material (basalt fiber?) a few miles bigger than the target asteroid. Put it around a rubble pile asteroid, and slowly spin it up until the asteroid spreads out to the walls of the bag. It only needs to be spun up to probably a few percent more than the almost non-existent asteroid's gravity. Then you can just pick out the materials you want for processing, all inside a shielded environment, as the now hollow asteroid has spread out in a layer miles thick around a hollow space acting as shielding from radiation. The idea is that you build your O'Neill Cylinders within the shielded environment of a hollow asteroid. This is a perfect place to build them as its protected from random space rocks and radiation, and all the materials to be refined are right there for the picking. Later if you want you could move them out... or just leave them there and build more!

Impressive soundtrack too.

Just amazing! Just simply amazing? Can you do one for a Bishop Ring, a Halo Ring, and a McKendree Cylinder. I guess you will have to time lapse parts of those...

Great production! I think I came across your experiments on Twitter (My Blender interest drives my feed there). The quality and amount of detail is amazing. Very very cool, thanks for sharing! I intrigues me how life in an O'Neill Colony would be like, but given the scale I think it would not even feel that weird. The music fits really well and I particularly like the wet patches in the evening scene, makes me wonder if the rain would be 'scheduled' in such a world.

I don't think such a habitat would have personal cars as a main means of urban transport but I really like the animation, seeing the rising horizon is very interesting.

This is beautiful!

need to see more of this

This almost made me cry because I know if we put aside our differences in race, creed, culture and politics we as humans can certainly achieve the goal of space habitability.

Absolut atemberaubendes Video! Herzlichen Dank :-)

Imagine rotating the burj Khalifa like the graviton at the fair, and then Flipping it with huge flywheels in space like a cube-sat. While also accelerating it. You were dealing with compressive, sheer, and tensional forces. While accelerating it

Terrific!

Fantastic. The streets looked wet. Could there be clouds and rain?

great work! i cant stop watching

Beautiful Stuff

I read numerous books back when O'Neill released his first book (The High Frontier; Human Colonies in Space, 1977 ) and became very interested in this subject. I honestly thought that by 2024 we would have at least built a toroid by now (Like in "2001, a Space Odyssey") and that I and many millions of others would be working and living in such a habitat. There are a lot of interesting phenomena that would be possible and required with these structures, as well any large rotating habitat. For instance, if you were to enter such a structure as pictured at the beginning of this video, getting "down" to the inner surface would likely cause nausea in most people, as the sideways acceleration coupled with the slowly increasing gravity effect would cause you to feel sick to your stomach. Therefore the elevators, if you will, would likely move fairly slowly, so that it might take an hour or more to move from the centerline to the livable surface. Another cool possibility discussed was how you could set up swimming pools in low gravity. You could build a curved floor pool and place it near the centerline so that the gravity was a fraction of the outer surface experienced, but still enough to keep the water in the pool and not have it form a sphere like we have seen in videos from the ISS. If the gravity was properly balanced, an accomplished swimmer could actually swim fast enough to get themselves out of the water! Human powered flight, with a pedal powered aircraft would be very easy if launched from near the centerline, and even from the surface if the gravity was less than "Earth Normal". You could easily control the climate in each of these cylinders as well. Have one that was perfectly temperate for the raising of crops. One that was always 72 degrees F and sunny! One that was cold and snowy for perpetual winter sports, etc. Humanity needs to do this. We need to move off this planet and let it heal. We have the technology (we've had it for over half a century) and we can develop those technologies we will need. Instead the human race as a whole spends several billions of dollars PER DAY on weapons, material and devices designed specifically to kill each other. We need to evolve so that humanity can thrive together, not continue to fight over scraps.

I wouldn’t use chemical rockets inside adding pollution within the cylinder. Trams and elevators should do the trick. Great work on this! Thank You!

Great work, nice use of the Utopia building set. Noticed some tree instancing issues near the water/beach lines. Loved the depth of feel and scale of your project. definitely subscribing. 😲

Many details about it are fictional and somewhat fantastical, but the general idea is 100% realistic. It obviously wouldn't be "us" from down here, using tiny rockets based on WW2 long range artillery, building habitats for millions of people. The early first generation habs like the "Stanford Torus" or O'Neill "Island One" 800 meter sphere are ours within 30 years (anytime since the '70s) with no new inventions needed. No fantasy hand-waving "unobtainium" materials or sentient AI nanotech self-assemblers needed. Cost would be like many other large infrastructure or industrial developments down here. Any who disagree are invited to show their professional qualifications in mining, construction, and astronautical engineering and where they've been published under peer-review showing that the '70s NASA Ames space settlement studies were wrong. They found that the largest pressure vessels which we could build with known engineering were `30km diameter. Concrete and steel. With titanium (which isn't particularly rare up there, maybe twice that. Maybe 80 years after the first infrastructure and small habitats are done, there might be desire to make something so huge. By then, IDK what we'll be using for "cost" or "expense", because there is practically literally endless supply of energy and raw materials and things like previously rare or precious metals, in flying mountains, literally raining down on us as we sit. Very many much richer than the Moon, and very much easier to get to and get materials from. Habitats cannot be a long body rotating around its long axis, because that's inherently unstable, wanting to wobble and tumble and go end over end. Yes you can use various means to overcome this, but a smart engineer doesn't design in defiance of the physical laws and then apply complexity to overcome the design flaws. See the "Kalpana" space habitat, for the optimum: maybe half or 2/3 the diameter in length. With attention to making the rim massive, like a shallow drum or Torus. The aerospace vehicles inside it and the "gravity" defying architecture are as fanciful as is the supposed fusion power supply and the light emitter in the center. The O'Neill and NASA Ames designs planned for realistic warm (filtered) sunlight at "ground level", anywhere in the Solar system and out into the Oort cloud.

Amazing

Echt super gemacht Ich wünschte darin zu leben zu können 👍🙋‍♂️

You could actually have hover cars that never touch the ground in an o Neil cylinder and it would take less power!

Did I see a "wink" somewhere around 3:18? A place called "Clarke central"? A wink to Rama, the book? Nice detail!!!

Love the animation.., Your infrastructure? Not so much. Maglevs? Hyperloops? Drones? Pods? Just because the setting is futuristic, doesn’t mean you have to stop using tech from the past… Trains, buses, and light rail are all more efficient and less costly than most of those other “high tech” options

I wish for it so dearly

All fun and games until someone drops a colony on Earth

lovely work, Mr. Garlick

Great!

I like the inside surface better

Nice! Does it have wheelchair access?

I have a retro-book, published at 1979, about O'Neil space colonies, buying somewhere online, it was a long time ago, and I'm not sure where I bought it!

To get this done fast we must send strong robots in space to construct it a little fast

Like the space colonies in seen in GUNDAM, like Side 7.

Maybe the cities could be less car-centric? I refuse to believe that even when we can start from scratch we'd still design our cities to be car-centric hell holes.

These will be fantastically expensive to build, materially and time-wise. Every cubic metre will be pricey. Thus there won’t be unproductive open spaces or open volumes. We’ll start with unimaginative capsules like the ones currently envisioned for the ISS-replacements. As that form-factor gets entrenched steadily larger agglomerations of the same unit will come on-line. Stanford Toruses.. stack them up until they resemble O’Neill cylinders. There will be habitation zones, those far enough away from the axis for 1 G living. Closer to the axis will be food production with the hope that plants will be okay with less gravity. Small habitation sections nearer still for Mars and Moon gravity. Surrounding the axis will be surplus materials storage. Backup oxygen, nitrogen, minerals, water, preserved food, general stuff that are oblivious to the gravity they’re stored at. It will all be spinning inside a protective, non-spinning shell. The shell will be dominated by rock and water jacket layers, protection against collision and radiation. The outside will be studded by photovoltaics, rockets, communication antennas and radiators. The water jacket will serve simultaneous functions. The most obvious: radiation shielding. A few metres thick will protect the interior against cosmic rays. Also backup water supply in the very unlikely failure of water recycling systems. Lastly: thermal control. Kept at a steady 18 degrees Celsius it will steady the cylinder through infrared exchange. The jacket in turn will be thermally regulated with solar collectors and radiators on the outside of the shell. A decent sized cylinder, say 30 km long, 9 km diameter could accommodate hundreds of millions completely self-sufficiently. A similar capacity as a city-building 30km by 30km by 30 stories tall.

They need to focus on this project

You can build a pair of stainless steel cylinders, and use the mass of both of them to mechanically launch a third cylinder towards Mars and eventually Venus and beyond

Text is not on the screen for long enough to read.

This cylinder better look like in blue origin

i wish this was in a video game

At 2:40, during the nighttime sequence, at the bottom left of the screen, there’s a bar there called the “Blade Runner Bar”! Probably where Androids go to dream of electric sheep, no doubt…

I imagine blimps and other lighter than air craft to be quite unstable in this environment because of significant gravity changes with changing altitudes.

Just try not to think that just several metres below your feet lies the cold hard remorseless vacuum of space and you’ll be fine……

Interior surface are of 1000 Km2, roughly, I think. (386 miles square). - Double these figures to account for both cylinders. That’s room for MILLIONS of colonists, in my opinion. With all the advances in rocketry, AI, automation and robotics, all it would take would be a spark of investment to snowball this into reality. Forget about Mars, build a dozen of these colonies and then let people live on Mars if they want to….. but by then, why would you want to??? I do think that this colony would actually be inside a very large ‘hollowed out’ asteroid for further protection from space debris and radiation, though.

This colony, Sweetwater, was built by patching together a closed type to an open type and is therefore, very unstable. It was made hastily in order to accommodate those refugees, who had survived the past space wars. This was the only measure taken by the Earth Federation government. They concluded that everything was fine as long as they made a container to stick the refugees in. They remained on Earth and refused to share the planet. My father, Zeon Deikun, had made a request to Earth for autonomy for all space immigrants known as 'spacenoids', but he was assassinated by the Zabi family. The Zabis had called themselves the Principality of Zeon and it launched a war of independence against the Earth. You know how it was to end, with the Zabis losing the war, which sealed their fate. But the Earth's government had grown arrogant. The Federation forces had become corrupt from within, giving birth to rogue Federation movements like the Titans and resulting in the brazen activities of Haman, who had falsely claimed to be a protector of the Zabi family. This history has made us all refugees! What is our future reflecting on this tragic history? I firmly believe mankind must do everything to prevent war from rising up again. This is the true purpose behind our operation to drop Axis onto Earth. To change history, hence we will discipline the people who continue to live on Earth and eliminate the source of any wars in Earth's sphere! Everyone! So that we may forge our own path and establish a government for the refugees. I ask you, lend me your great strength for just a little while longer! When we've succeeded, I will then be able to join my father, Zeon!

damn... the presentation, the attention to detail, you really get a feel for the gigantic dimensions! 😃 So, what about a re-render in stereoscopic 360° for VR? 😁

Hope

Is this 8km in diameter x 32km long (5mi x 20mi)?

Very beautiful, but I think based on contemporary thinking in the way Jules Verne's idea of an airship was a nautical ship suspended from a gas bag. In O'Neill cylinders, interior natural space is at a premium. Why clutter it up with buildings when you control the climate anyway? The hull can be many decks thick. You could put all your living and working space in the hull, to conserve natural space on the "surface". If nothing else, why waste internal surface area on roads for cars, or elevated trains, when there can be "underground" subway lines traversing the full length of the tube at intervals around its diameter? These colonies aren't so large that all transport needs couldn't be met without personal vehicles. Something like a parking structure would be an obscenely costly waste of space in such a space constrained setting, unless it's also in the hull. Even then, are roads also subterranean? Cars just don't make a lot of sense here. I also wonder at spacecraft flying around the interior. I understand the center is at microgravity, but one swoops close to the surface. Electric aircraft, sure, ok. But nuclear or chemical rocket exhaust, inside the recirculated atmosphere? Are we to believe antigravity exists by this point, too? If so, what need is there of spin gravity? Not knocking the animation, it's spectacular, just questioning whether we're looking at 25th century structures through 21st century eyes and making some wrong assumptions as a consequence. Incidentally, if ever you wish to visit such a cylinder in VR, there's a to-scale one with working spin gravity in VRChat called Island-4 by the author A_ASAGIRI: vrclist.com/world/7780

It would get hot near that florescent tube in the center.

An interesting fact: In artificial gravity, planes and aerostats COULD NOT fly like on Earth. Without touching the ground, they are NOT rotating, thus, there is no gravity force bringing them down. As well for aerostats: in this big tube, air density would be the same at any point, so there is no up-force bringing them up :)

When can I move in?

Wonder how it drops?

Siek Zeon !

Good, very similar to the one in Szireutt