9 Places We Could Build Space Colonies

4. Asteroid Belt

You might wonder why anyone would want to colonise a cold, lifeless space rock with no atmosphere, but setting up space bases in the asteroid belt could have its advantages.

For a start, asteroids are rich in all kinds of resources needed to fuel a space-faring civilisation. Precious metals, rare gases and liquid water could be mined and exported all over the solar system. Many smaller asteroids also pass closer to the Earth than our own moon several times a decade before heading off some 500,000,000 kilometers away from Earth, making them a kind of hop-on-hop-off transport system for the solar system.

Isaac Asimov even proposed the idea of building cities inside hollowed-out asteroids. The combined area we would be able to cover by doing this too all of the asteroids in the belt would be the equivalent of a mile-high city covering the entire surface of the Earth.

We could potentially locate the main asteroid belt base on Ceres, a dwarf planet within the belt itself and accounting for a third of its total mass. Given its low gravity and fast rotation, Ceres would make an ideal spot for a space elevator.