Over the next 15 years, humans could live on giant orbs floating in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.
That's the bonkers assertion made by Dr. Pekka Janhunen, the top scientist, who says that by 2026 millions of people will occupy a megacity in space.
In a research paper published this month, Janhunen, an astrophysicist at the Finnish Meteorology Institute in Helsinki, identified his vision.
Floating "mega-satellites" around the dwarf planet Ceres, which is about 325 million miles from Earth, he set out the blueprint.
The motivation is to have an artificial gravity settlement that allows for development outside the living area of the Planet," Janhunen wrote.
The vast majority of remote world-settlement plots revolve around the moon or Mars. This is partly due to their closeness to Earth.
On the other side, Janhunen's idea looks a little further afield.
Thousands of cylindrical buildings will boast his disk-shaped habitat, each home to more than 50,000 people.
Those pods will be connected by strong magnets and, by slowly rotating, create artificial gravity.
Using "space elevators," Janhunen said, residents will mine resources from Ceres 600 miles below the settlement and transport them back up.
"Compared to processing them into habitats, lifting the materials from Ceres is energetically cheap, if a space elevator is used," he wrote.
"The space elevator is feasible because Ceres has low gravity and rotates relatively fast."