Not a bad place to live, as long as we can afford it.
If you don’t know, a
torus is a geometrical shape which is basically a surface of revolution generated by revolving a circle in three-dimensional space about an axis that is coplanar with the circle. To put it otherwise – a doughnut. It is namely that shape which one project for the 70’s had in mind for a space station. At that point small space stations did exist but why should we limit ourselves to 2-3 people when we could think of something for 10,000? That was the ambition which the Stanford Torus had – a huge human city in near-Earth orbit. Its rotation would provide gravity, similar to the one we have on Earth and life of the locals would provoke envy in all of the world (like in Elysium).
The Stanford Torus had no clear function, though, the amount of materials needed was unimaginable and the initial cost for the project went way above 200 billion dollars at the time. It’s no wonder it did not come to pass. In sci-fi, though, we’ve seen so many space stations that this idea doesn’t look even remotely absurd – maybe even our grandchildren could live to see it realized.
