I’m religious in the sense that I want to fill the cosmos with the best possible lives. This dream for the creatures of Earth led me to the Lagrange 5 point where I oversaw the automated manufacturing of the O’Neill cylinder known as Solarium. At L5, 1,500,000 kilometers from Earth, the vast cylindrical habitat formed an equilateral triangle with the Earth and sun. At this point, the gravitational forces of the large bodies keep the smaller object in equilibrium, and so it was in a small, stable orbit that we built the large-scale space habitat. Once finished, Solarium was 32 kilometers long, with a radius of 3.2 kilometers. It made a full revolution every 114 seconds, resulting in the sensation of artificial Earth gravity—1G.
I rose from my bed in the lowrise apartment I shared with three other automation-construction supervisors. I sprinkled a small portion of freshies into my oatmeal—blueberries in this case, which had been grown a few kilometers down the cylinder in the agricultural sector—a special treat for a Monday. I clambered onto my bicycle and began the eight kilometer ride to work, which would take me through the center of town.
After the death of my mother and my divorce, there was little left on Earth for me. I signed a five year contract and booked a one way trip; a fresh start was a dream fulfilled.
I was strapped into a tiny capsule at the top of a rocket, which exploded until we were in orbit. The blue skies gave way to impenetrable blackness, peppered only with stars. The perpetual sunrises were just like Alexei Leonov’s colored pencil drawing, as the first person to spacewalk: a red sliver peaked over the horizon, followed by yellow, then the entire blue orb glowed. Peering out the window at such a vision, I felt kinship with all the organisms of Earth grow in my chest.
We were on the moon for a spell. I enjoyed bounding around the residential facility in 0.1654G. I made sure to do the touristy activities like seeing the historical sites—one small step, and so on—before the mass driver flung us off the pockmarked orb and on our way to L5.
Then there was the year and a half transit, which my new employer filled with coursework on supervising the construction systems. I made some friends during the training who had signed similar contracts and who remain close to me to this day.
Upon arrival at L5, the workers' living quarters were already habitable, but the rest was for us to build. At first sight, the cylinder bending round into what seemed to be the sky itself startled me. There were vast windows where enormous mirrors poured sunlight into the space habitat. The gentle arc of the nearby residential buildings, each a few stories high, gave way to apparently upside down buildings far overhead. It still sometimes surprises me, after all this time.
Years later, on my ride to work I contemplated the potential of Solarium, the realization of which had only just begun, in my view. The dream for the space habitat was to create a pollution-free, self-sustaining colony. Sterile biomes eliminated the need for pesticides in the vast agricultural fields, which were separate from living areas. A self-sustaining habitat off the
Earth reduced the existential risks of being a single-planet species. Solarium-supported industry in space was separate from Earth’s fragile biome, harvesting the energy and resources of space without industrial byproducts to threaten the delicate and interdependent biosphere. The bay was above me, its long suspension bridge upside down as ever. Sailboats cruised far above on what was, still sometimes surprisingly, the ceiling.
I rode beneath the expansive structural sky through the town center, known formally as Market Street, but more often referred to as Billionaires’ Square. The sheen of the buildings composed its famous real estate market. Because of the expense of traveling to L5, apart from the workers who assembled it—whose passage was included in their contracts—only the wealthiest had made it to Solarium thus far. There was an old joke among the workers: Australia was settled by convicts, the United States was settled by puritans, the Solarium Space Station was settled by billionaires, and the space station got the short end of the stick.
The wealth inequality on Solarium was thick. Late-stage capitalism was consolidating the wealth on Earth, while those who had enough yachts set their sights beyond Billionaire’s Row in Manhattan. A building on Solarium signaled wealth still more strongly than a place in the Hamptons.
I saw the inequality in the tight living quarters those of us who supervised the construction shared. I pitied it at the café, where each morning the same woman would scratch and scratch at a futile lottery ticket. I heard it in the laugh tracks of the sitcoms my flatmates used to escape from work, and in the loud insistence of the sitcoms’ commercials. I saw it in the workers I would have drinks with after work, who told me their dreams felt unattainable, the lifestyles they wanted out of reach. I felt it on my bike rides around the cylinder’s beautiful countryside. It was palpable when I went home to my tin can after biking past the sprawling vineyards on my days off. The peace on Solarium was guarded by private security and gated communities.
I pedaled on. As I approached the town center, I heard voices in synchrony, still unintelligible at this distance. As I rounded the corner, between the colorfully tiled buildings there was a protest, a sight unlike any I had seen on Solarium thus far. Workers, easily recognizable by their turquoise jumpsuits, had assembled with brightly colored signs, all decrying inequality in different ways. A genuine protest—the 2020s live! As I approached on my bicycle, the collective voices resolved into words.
“Say it loud, say it clear, inequality is rampant here.”
The protests continued for forty-three days, miraculously with minimal injuries and no deaths as protesters clashed with private security forces. The Earth-based government fell and leadership resigned. We were faced with the mammoth task of creating a government from scratch. The literature on ideal governance structures was astonishingly thin—there were the board and executive models of corporate hierarchies, there were the divided powers of constitutional republics, there were the small, locally run, and autonomous anarchist collectives. Like B.R. Ambedkar writing independent India’s constitution in 1947, we became scholars of all the successful constitutions of the world. We sought guidance from the constitutions of the world’s oldest democracy—San Marino—and the world’s largest—India. When the negotiators were finished, we had a constitution which included all species and which we hoped would allow the flourishing of earth-life in space.
The preamble began: We the organisms of the Orion-Cygnus arm, represented by our elected leaders, in order to coordinate the use of the vast resources of outer space, share the fruits of peaceful cooperation, harvest the bountiful energy pouring from the sun, be outlived by our children, discover the nature of reality for ourselves and posterity, do proclaim the Solarium Space Station a sovereign, democratic, and secular republic.
Posterity called it the Silken Revolution, in a nod to Czechoslovakia’s nonviolent Velvet Revolution which ended one party rule in that corner of the great blue orb in 1989.
In the long run, the government of Solarium tried to get it together to build a Dyson swarm—an elaborate network of satellites which would create a sphere around the sun, harvesting its energy. It was a multilateral feat of cooperation humanity hadn’t touched yet. Asteroid mining, with L5 as a base, began in earnest. We slowly slogged from a clumsy 0.73 on the Kardashev scale—harvesting a fraction of our star’s light—towards the goal of type II, where we could harvest all the energy of our sun. The aspiration of type III, where we could harvest the energy of the galaxy was, you could say, a little while off. But the idea was worth dreaming.