As the commentor below stated, I do not believe humans will colonize anything but our own solar system. Things are simply too far away, even assuming there is some breakthrough that speeds up travel by two or three orders of magnitude.
We will figure it out.
You are extremely optimistic about having several hundred million years left on Earth, when the longest living hominid existed for only ~2 million years.
I firmly believe that homo sapiens will self-destruct long before that point, as we have greatly overstressed the planet in only 200,000 years, mostly in the last 200.
My view is that learning to master inhabitation of Mars and other places in space will enable us to revert Earth from a bunch of agricultural land and farms and suburban sprawl back into a garden (dotted with dense, luxurious cities) which we camp out in during the weekend.
Space development shows how to thrive WITHOUT fossil fuels. It’s so strange to me that folks seem to have this backwards.
How does that work, exactly?
>Space development shows how to thrive WITHOUT fossil fuels.
Not sure how that's the case given the staggering emissions of Falcon 9 for example.
Hydrogen is one of the most common rocket fuels, and Starship will need to used synthesized methane (which we actually make on board ISS using direct cabin air carbon capture and the Sabatier process using hydrogen made from water split with solar electricity) on Mars to return to be reused, and Musk said SpaceX would eventually use synthesized methane for Earth-side refueling of Starship as well.
> However, even if slower, terraforming Mars remains a great long-term goal; but long-term meaning like ten thousand years. Which means we have to get our relationship to our own planet in order for anything interesting to happen on Mars…
> The main project for civilization now is creating a sustainable way of life here on Earth. That’s the necessary first step; anything beyond would rely on that succeeding, so exploring space is less important now. That said, space science is an earth science. What we learn around the solar system can often illuminate the project we have here of keeping this planet’s biosphere healthy. So I like the space program, and feel it is not funded out of proportion to its importance. Robotic missions are already doing a lot of what we need done, but humans are better at many things than robots, and it’s more exciting to see humans on the other planets than it is to see robots. So, on balance, I’d like to see more investment in space science and less in areas like weaponry. Our taxpayer bailout of the banker gamblers who lost their bets in 2008 cost us about ten thousand times the entirety of what we’ve spent on NASA.
https://www.publicbooks.org/earth-first-then-mars-an-intervi...
This interview in particular is worth reading for this whole topic being discussed here.
This hand waves away all the accomplishments in seafaring prior to the 19th century.
There were loads of innovations around the shape and profiling of ship hulls depending on conditions in which they operated. Same for sails and stuff, not to mention doing away with rowers. This improved speed quite a lot on top of range.
Not simply, but mostly: progress started before the steam engine. But yeah, pop sci is hyping a lot of things that are very, very unlikely in the near future, and it looks like we won’t have much beyond that.
It would take those nukes three days to reach earth, which is a huge amount of time for countermeasures to target and destroy them. And a handful of responding nukes could easily wipe out all lunar military sites and personnel, while lunar weapons could barely nick Earths military capabilities.
There's so many engineering and scientific advancements needed to make space-based sustainable colonies using materials sourced solely from Earth that your position would delay any colonization of space past a few great filters.
I was enjoying your takes on preserving Mars, but saying that humanity should only be allowed to change Earth is nihilistic in the extreme.