US cosmologist (宇宙学家) Carl Sagan once said: “Across the sea of space, the stars are other suns.”

For centuries, human beings have dreamed of traveling into space, orbiting (围绕......运行) our little blue planet, and appreciating incredible views of sunrises and sunsets. And soon, it seems that our dream will finally come true, as US startup Orion Span announced on April 6 that it planned to launch the first hotel in space in 2021. It will be ready to welcome guests the following year.

The space hotel, Aurora Station, will orbit 320 kilometers above Earth, circling it every 90 minutes. It’s capable of housing two crew members and four guests. The crew members will likely be former NASA astronauts who worked on the International Space Station. However, there’s a catch: Each guest must pay at least $9.5 million (60 million yuan) for a 12-day stay at the hotel.

Once aboard the Aurora Station, guests will find many exciting things to do. According to Orion Span, guests can enjoy the excitement of zero-gravity as they fly throughout the space hotel. They can watch 16 sunrises and sunsets every day and view the northern and southern auroras (极光) through the many windows. They can take part in research experiments like growing food, and even take it home as a souvenir. And they can stay in touch with their families and friends via a high-speed internet connection.

But most importantly, the trip will offer a real sense of what it’s like to live in space. “The premise (前提) of Aurora Station is for guests to live, feel, and [breathe] what it’s like to be an astronaut,” Frank Bunger, founder of Orion Span, told the Robb Report. “The food and drinks are freeze-dried products. It’s not going to be five-star dining … Fire and gas don’t work the same way in space as they do on Earth.”

To better prepare guests for space travel, the company will require a health screening and provide a three-month training program that helps guests understand basic spaceflight, orbital mechanics (轨道力学) and life in the pressurized environment of space.

Some may have doubts about the project, but the company even has plans to turn part of Aurora Station into private apartments. “Future Aurora owners can live in, visit, or sublease (转租) their space [apartment],” Bunger said in a news release. “This is an exciting frontier (待开发的领域) and Orion Span is proud to pave the way.”

You are just waking up in the spring of 2030. Your Internet of Things (IoT) bedroom opens solar powered e-windows and plays gentle music while your smart lighting displays a montage (剪辑的) of beachfront sunrises from your recent vacation.

Your shower uses very little water or soap. It recycles your grey water and puts the extra heat back into your home’s operating system. While you dress, your artificial intelligence (Al) assistant shares your schedule for the day and plays your favorite tunes.

You still start your day with a coffee but it comes from your IoT refrigerator which is capable of providing a coffeehouse experience in your home. A hot breakfast tailored to your specific nutritional needs (based on chemical analysis from your trips to the “smart toilet”) is waiting for you in the kitchen.

When it’s time to leave, an on-demand transport system has three cars waiting for you, your wife (or husband) and your kids. On the road, driverless cars and trucks move with mathematical accuracy, without traffic jams, routine maintenance or road rage. Accident rates are near zero.

On the way, you call your R&D team, who are enveloping a day’s work in Shanghai. Your life-sized image is projected (投射) into the China Innovation Centre and your colleagues see you as if you were sitting in the room. It’s a bit strange for them to see you in the morning light because it’s dark on the Bund, Shanghai’s waterfront, though the novelty disappears after a few uses.

You review the day’s cloud- based data from your Shenzhen manufacturing center, your pilot project in San Diego, and your QA team in Melbourne. The large amounts of datasets were collected in real-time from every piece of equipment and have been beautifully summarized by your company’s AI. All these facilities are closely maintained and operated through an advanced predictive analytics platform.

Pleased with the team’s progress, you end the call and ease into a good book.

This is the future and it will be here sooner than you think.

The home of the future won’t be completely different and we will be living in houses and flats just as we do today. But people will want to shape their homes to match their dreams. No two homes will be the same. People will be able to buy “house kits” containing a basic house structure, with movable walls, doors and windows. They will put together the different parts to create the home they want.

Many jobs that we do today will disappear, others will still exist but will change and new jobs will be created. Skilled workers such as builders, gardeners and electricians won’t disappear because machines can’t replace them. Teachers will still exist because students need human contact. But they will be using modern technology in class more and students will be working more at home. The medical technology revolution and space travel will create new jobs which we can only imagine today.

Space holidays will develop in the future, but these holidays won’t be for everyone because they won’t be cheap. Short space trips will develop first;then space hotels will orbit the earth where it will be possible to have a longer vacation. By the end of the next century, there will have been holiday centres on the moon with leisure facilities (休闲设施) for families.

Paper won’t exist in the future. Instead, there will be e­paper which people will be able to use over and over again. This will develop in order to save natural resources. E­newspapers and e­magazines will replace traditional newspapers and magazines and we will download information and news articles from the Internet every day onto our reusable paper.

The laws of physics tell us that the Earth is going to disappear some time in the future. This isn’t going to happen tomorrow but scientists predict that it will happen in five billion years when our sun explodes. We will have to explore the universe and find another home. At some point in the distant future, either we stay on the Earth and die with it, or we leave and move to another planet. There won’t be any other choice.