“I must say to you that we do not want in the least to conquer outer space. We want to expand the Earth toward its boundaries. We do not know what to do with other worlds. We do not need other worlds…. Humans need humans!”
From Andrei Tarkovsky’s film Solaris
Abstract
Several decades ago, science-fiction writers and futurologists predicted that in the early 21st century humankind would begin to inhabit other planets of the solar system and their satellites. In reality, interplanetary flights and the colonization of extraterrestrial territories have proved to be more intractable tasks than it had seemed earlier, and this difficulty has led to a noticeable drop in interest in these problems. However, it follows from the article published below that we should not defer the problem of expanding the human living space beyond the Earth to future generations. The first steps along this difficult path can and must be made today, because, first, there are no fundamental technological obstacles and, second, even significant financial investments are justified when dealing with the problem of preserving humankind, which is endangered by numerous terrestrial and extraterrestrial threats.
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Original Russian Text © S.V. Antonenko, S.I. Bartsev, A.G. Degermendzhi, 2015, published in Vestnik Rossiiskoi Akademii Nauk, 2015, Vol. 85, No. 10, pp. 885–895.
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Antonenko, S.V., Bartsev, S.I. & Degermendzhi, A.G. An artificial habitat for colonizing the solar system. Her. Russ. Acad. Sci. 85, 402–411 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1134/S1019331615050056
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1134/S1019331615050056