NASA has revealed what it thought the future might look like back in the 1970s and it's pretty impressive.

Three concepts for space colonies were drawn up showing elaborate communities to house anything from 10,000 people all the way up to a full 1 million people, with everything from rivers to trees to fully enclosed agriculture pods.

NAS thought that rather than living on planets, settlers would live on gigantic spaceships in three different designs: cylindrical colonies, toroidal -- or donut shaped -- colonies and Bernal spheres in which the people would live inside a giant hollow sphere.

The settlements would be airtight to hold a breathable atmosphere and would rotate in order to provide psuedo-gravity so the people could stand on the inside of the hull of any given ship.

The renderings were drawn up by researchers at NASA's Ames Research Center and Stanford University during three space colony summer studies done in the 1970s, when space exploration was arguably reaching towards its heyday. Thave been kept under wraps until now.

The cylindrical design is perhaps the most impressive, with the potential to house over 1 million people with full-grown living landscapes mixed with human engineering like a suspension bridge.

The agriculture models in the Bernal sphere design show cattle being raised in fields on one level while above, on a second tier, regular farm machinery harvests crops.

Many benefits of living in a colony are noted including access to "continuous, ample, reliable solar energy" and "great views from Earth."

Enormous amounts of matter, probably lunar soil at first, according to the researchers, must cover the settlements to protect inhabitants from radiation just as the Earth's atmosphere is designed to protect us regular Earthlings.

NASA's settlements website shows just how optimistic these visionaries were about how far space travel could develop, suggesting the idea of launching millions of people to live in space was not totally outlandish.

Read the original post:

NASA of the 1970s reveals how it thought the future would look