Story continues after the gallery.

In a wonderful bit of mental flexibility, space colonies had a distinct ecotopian bent. I mean the latter adjective to refer specifically to Ecotopia, Ernest Callenbach's 1975 fantastical voyage into a near-future in which the upper west coast has seceded to become a paradise for lovers of what was known as "appropriate technology." (Check out those floating wind turbines!) Appropriate technology was supposed to be scaled to human-needs and not energy intensive, though the term quickly came to encompass a bunch of other stuff that was mainly united by its lack of "high technology."

It's fascinating that this vision of appropriate technology, popularized by E.F. Schumacher in a book called Small Is Beautiful, was so easy to beam up to space with so many of its particulars attached. There's even a "human-powered airplane" in one of the illustrations.

It's not actually hard to see why such a thing was possible, this marriage of high and appropriate technology. Conceptually, the colonies, while they required massive resources to build, would have been self-contained human communities without easy access to Earth's supply chains. They would have been frontier towns in space and as such would have had to prize self-reliance, closed-loop design, and alternative energy. Not only that, but the space colonies would have run satellite solar power stations (an idea that still kicks around now and again), providing them with a reason to be and an income -- and obviating the need to develop the more high-fallutin' forms of nuclear power like breeder reactors.

Practically, the space colony and counterculture met at the Stewart Brand-led magazine, CoEvolution Quarterly. Brand gave Gerry O'Neill, the technical director of that NASA design study, room to make his case in the pages of the "peculiar magazine" known for its brilliant countercultural quirkiness about decidedly more earthly issues. Here's O'Neill selling his plan to CQ's readers:

That frontier can be exploited for all of humanity, and its ultimate extent is a land area many thousands of times that of the entire Earth. As little as ten years ago we lacked the technical capability to exploit that frontier. Now we have that capability, and if we have the willpower to use it we can not only benefit all humankind, but also spare our threatened planet and permit its recovery from the ravages of the industrial revolution.

Some of the magazine's readers thought the plan was nuts, so Brand gave them a chance to respond within the pages. Some of the quotes are interspersed with the illustrations of the space colonies that top this post.

Like so many visions of the future, the space colony model as promoted by O'Neill tells us as much about 1975 as it does about low-earth orbit's ultimate potential. And somehow, I suspect that's why Brand gave the idea so much play.