At the beginning of the 1970s, American physicist Gerard K. O’Neill developed the first ideas for colonizing space. Shortly thereafter, Stewart Brand, cyber-communard and editor of the Whole Earth Catalog, took up these ideas and published the book Space Colonies in 1977. Space Colonies, an edition of Brand’s CoEvolution Quarterly, funded by the proceeds of the Whole Earth Catalog, took up the question of whether space might be colonized by the year 2000.