Interlude from UC0079: Lalah and Amuro

The 1979 Japanese animation saga Mobile Suit Gundam features, amongst the melodrama of teens flying gigantic warrior robots, and considerable amount of hard (if speculative) science around the possible colonization of space. In the ‘Universal Century’ world much of the human population is living in space in colonies of stations positioned at various Earth-Moon Lagrange points (stable orbital points where the gravity of the Earth and the Moon cancel each other out).

Much work on the colonization of space, including design of possible stations was formulated by NASA researcher Gerard K. O’Neill in the 1970s. The makers of Mobile Suit Gundam took O’Neill’s work (especially O’Neill’s space station design: so-called O’Neill cylinders) and used it as a backdrop for their world.

The 1960s and 1970s was a time of feverish speculation about possible space technologies, which fuelled the imaginations of a generation of young minds. Since then the excitement has dimmed somewhat, in the face of the demands and constraints of affairs on Earth, but in the last decade technologies have matured and interest has reignited (especially in the area of commercial space exploration), and the next decade holds much more promise than (in this author’s view) any time in the past three.

While the background world was rooted in serious scientific speculation, other elements of the story are more mystical, examining how living in space might change humanity and alter the course of its evolution. The conversation in this track (in Japanese) discusses this metaphysics.

It has been said that it would be of benefit to human kind to send artists and poets into space to report back to the rest of us what it’s like. Perhaps soon we will be able to find out for ourselves; for now we have to rely on science fiction writers to imagine it for us.