In the future, residents living in a space station orbiting Earth will speak three languages and eat meat grown in labs.
That's the vision of Eric Yam, a Grade 12 student at Northern Secondary School in Toronto, outlined in his space colony design that won NASA's National Space Settlement Competition.
Yam is the only Canadian to win the contest in its 16-year history.
"I was pretty surprised when I got the news. It's not everyday that you get a prestigious award from NASA," the 17-year-old told CTV Newsnet on Saturday.
Yam's design is named Asten, the Egyptian god of divine and physical law. It's composed of a series of stacked rings that makes up a hollow cylinder. The structure, one-kilometre wide and 1.6-kilometre high, would hold 10,000 residents and allow about 300 visitors at a time.
Visitors would be flown to and from the colony, which would orbit 36,000 kilometres above Earth, on special planes.
Yam's 92-page design beat 300 student entries, from 900 students around the world, and tied with a team from Orissa, India.
Yam is not receiving any prize money, but he will be heading to Orlando later this month to speak to NASA officials about his design. Buzz Aldrin, the second man to walk on the moon in 1969, is said to be the keynote speaker at the event.
The annual contest calls for students in Grades 6 to 12 to create a space colony that would orbit the Earth 50 years in the future. The entries are then judged by engineers and scientists at NASA.
Judges particularly liked the modularity of the structure of Yam's design, in that sections are mass-produced and can be replaced easily. They also like Yam's use of existing technology like growing animal tissue to feed the inhabitants.
Finally, judges favoured the social systems Yam created for the society, which he said were inspired by his Canadian heritage.
But while the colony would have similar health care, education and taxes to Canadian society he said the system of government would be more like that of the U.S.
To select citizens for the colony, Yam would employ a point-based immigration system, as used by Immigration Canada, that would score people on factors like age, education, and whether they can speak one of the colony's three languages: Hindi, Mandarin and English.
The food would be as similar to food we eat on Earth now, but with less with less packaging, Yam said.
Yam also said he doesn't see his dream becoming a reality in the near future, but that such a space station may be needed eventually.
"Maybe a million years from now when the Earth starts to run out of resources, we're going to have to start looking elsewhere."
He said he thinks there is a "desire in all of us to explore the final frontier."
The high school student is set to attend the University of Waterloo this fall for Mechatronics engineering program.
