Two visions for humanity’s future beyond Earth.
Published by Norm Levy: August 2026
When most people imagine humanity’s future in space, they picture another planet.
A city on Mars.
A permanent settlement on the Moon.
People living beneath alien skies, building new lives on distant worlds.
It’s an exciting vision, and one that has captured the public imagination for decades.
Today, it feels closer than ever.
SpaceX continues to push the boundaries of reusable rockets while openly pursuing the long-term goal of making humanity a multi-planetary species. More recently, the company has outlined plans to establish robotic manufacturing on the Moon as a stepping stone toward future settlements on Mars. Governments around the world are also investing in long-term lunar exploration, recognizing that the Moon may become humanity’s first permanent foothold beyond Earth.
But there is another vision.
One that is every bit as ambitious, yet surprisingly unfamiliar outside the space community.
Instead of settling planets…
Build worlds.
In the 1970s, Princeton physicist Gerard K. O’Neill asked a deceptively simple question.
Why struggle to adapt human beings to environments that were never meant for us?
Why not build environments designed specifically for human life?
His answer was the O’Neill Cylinder: an enormous rotating habitat that generates artificial gravity through rotation while providing Earth-like living conditions inside. Parks, lakes, neighborhoods, farms, schools, factories, and concert halls could all exist beneath a manufactured sky, surrounded by the vacuum of space.
The idea was radical.
It still is.
Yet many engineers continue to study habitat concepts because they solve problems that planets cannot. Gravity can be designed. Climate can be controlled. Day and night can be simulated. Habitats can be built where they are most useful rather than where nature happened to place a planet.
For years, discussions about humanity’s future often sounded like a choice between these two paths.
Planets.
Or habitats.
The more I learned, however, the less convinced I became that they compete with one another.
The truth is, humanity may ultimately build both.
The Moon could become an industrial center.
Mars could become our first self-sustaining planetary settlement.
Free-flying habitats could house millions of people living and working in space while supporting manufacturing, research, transportation, and commerce throughout the Solar System.
Each serves a different purpose.
Each represents another chapter in humanity’s expansion beyond Earth.
What fascinates me isn’t deciding which vision is right.
It’s recognizing what they all have in common.
Every one of them eventually stops being a transportation problem.
Or even an engineering problem.
They become civilization problems.
Cities do not exist because someone imagined them.
They exist because generations of people built them.
Homes.
Power systems.
Schools.
Hospitals.
Parks.
Factories.
Communities.
Culture.
Whether humanity’s first great city rises on the Moon, on Mars, or inside a rotating habitat inspired by Gerard O’Neill’s vision, someone will spend years assembling its infrastructure and transforming it into a place people truly call home.
That realization stayed with me for a long time.
Eventually, it became one of the ideas that inspired Band on the Run.
The novel doesn’t take sides between planets and habitats. Instead, it asks a different question altogether.
If humanity truly begins building civilizations beyond Earth…
Who will build them?
As we watch extraordinary advances unfold over the coming decades, I suspect we’ll continue debating where humanity should build its future.
I hope we’ll spend just as much time thinking about the people who will make that future possible.
Because civilizations aren’t defined by where they stand.
They’re defined by the people who build them.