Space Architecture

Topic owner: Dyvyansh

Topics:

Consider:

Systematic approaches to space architecture (or better to the expansion of habitability beyond Earth and niche construction).
Declared plans and designs by the spaces agencies.
Key challenges and proposed solutions.
Critique as well as promise of space colonies.
Nonhuman space travellers specifically.

Add a critical angle

Kim Stanley Robinson (Mars trilogy, multi-generational space travel, etc.) as a way to imagine the complex societies.

Wellbeing and the dimensions of wellbeing, human body, mind, community, enhancements, environments, including extreme conditions such as in space.

Space colonies are colonies with the colonialism as the consequence, cf. the biological unification of the Earth1 as the only comparable precedent.

References

Herrmann-Pillath, Carsten. “The Earth’s Living Infrastructure: Multispecies Niche Construction in the Gaian Cité.” In Cross-Disciplinary Dialogues with the Earth Sciences, edited by Martin Bohle and Cornelia E. Nauen, 187–224. Cham: Springer, 2025. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-97445-8_7.

Lineweaver, Charles, Sarah McIntyre, and Aditya Chopra. “The Evolution of Habitability: Characteristics of Habitable Planets.” In Handbook of Astrobiology, 685–98. Boca Raton: CRC Press, 2019.

Odling-Smee, John C. Niche Construction: How Life Contributes to Its Own Evolution. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2024.

Odling-Smee, John, Douglas H. Erwin, Eric P. Palkovacs, Marcus W. Feldman, and Kevin N. Laland. “Niche Construction Theory: A Practical Guide for Ecologists.” The Quarterly Review of Biology 88, no. 1 (2013): 3–28. https://doi.org/10.1086/669266.

Wong, Michael L., Stuart Bartlett, Sihe Chen, and Louisa Tierney. “Searching for Life, Mindful of Lyfe’s Possibilities.” Life 12, no. 6 (2022): 783. https://doi.org/10.3390/life12060783.

Footnotes

Crosby, Alfred W. Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900–1900. 1986; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015.˄

References