How could humanity build O'Neill cylinders?

Question

explain how humanity can get to creating o'neal cylinders

askNib · Accepted Answer

Humanity wants room to grow, but planets are small and hard on rockets. A giant spinning can in space could hold a whole valley of people. Gerard O'Neill, a physics professor, worked out in the 1970s that free space — not planet surfaces — is where big cheap structures could really work. Rockets are expensive per kilogram, and planets have deep gravity wells. But asteroids and the Moon have weak gravity — cheap to mine, cheap to launch from. So the real dream isn't rockets full of colonists — it's a supply chain of raw material from the Moon and asteroids, built into cylinders using solar power and orbital factories. That's the foundation: a shrinking Earth, a bigger canvas in space, and cheap material from low-gravity neighbors instead of hauling everything up from home. So the whole idea starts with escaping Earth's gravity well cheaply — next we build the cylinder itself. Ask me more, or pick a section!