Booooo. You must be so fun at parties.
I refuse to believe. I don't care how rational or well reasoned your arguments may be, I won't give up hope that someday someone will be living somewhere other than Earth. Your arguments will only result in a roadmap of challenges to overcome. I, likely we, need an open ended future, don't try to take that away.
This is so unimaginative.
There's one thing that has to happen, and the solar system opens up - manufacturing outside the gravity well. That's it.
Energy is cheap in space. The sun is right there, unfiltered. Raw materials are cheap in space - ice and metals are everywhere. Life is expensive in space
Automation makes it very easy. If you can make a robots that can maintain each other, and eventually manufacture parts, you can build mega structures given time
And we're getting very close to that. It's basically inevitable at this point... The question isn't if it's possible, it's if our species can loosen the chains of capitalism before we strangle ourselves for no reason
Great article. I'm glad 'Star Trek' still looms so large in the public imagination; it's given us a really hopeful template for the future.
Definitely interested to read your take on why colonizing Mars is never happening. Far as I'm aware, there's no laws of physics stopping it, it's rather a number of complex engineering problems.