2081: A Hopeful View of The Human Future - Part III: The World in 2081

Part III: The World in 2081

This section was written as a series of dispatches home from "Eric C. Rawson", a native of a distant space colony called "Fox Cluster". By analogy with American religious colonists such as the Puritans and Mormons, O'Neill suggests that such a colony might have been founded by a group of pacifists who chose to live about twice as far from the Sun as Pluto in order to avoid involvement in Earth's wars. His calculations indicate that colonies at this distance could have Earth-level sunlight using a mirror the same weight as the colony itself. Eric pays a visit to the Earth of 2081 to take care of family business and explore a world that is nearly as foreign to him as it is to us.

After each dispatch, O'Neill added a section that described his reasoning for each situation the visitor described, such as riding a "floater" train going thousands of miles per hour in vacuum, interacting with a household robot or visiting a fully enclosed Pennsylvania city with a tropical climate in midwinter. Each section was written from his perspective as a physicist. For example, his description of "Honolulu, Pennsylvania" included multiple roof layers that could be retracted in good weather. The city enjoyed an artificial tropical climate all year because of internal climate controls and advanced insulation. He also proposed magnetically levitated "floater" trains moving in very-low-pressure tunnels that would replace airplanes on heavily traveled routes.