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Comment by sevg | Hacker News Reader

I mean these launches are fun to watch, but this century we could see advances in AI and robotics that change the way we work or the way we see the world or lead to social and economic reforms, advances in quantum computing that change the way we have to do encryption or make certain computations possible that seemed impossible before, transportation innovations (hyperloop?), advances in the fight against climate change (renewable energy, carbon capture, battery technology, sustainable agriculture, international cooperation etc) such that our planet doesn't enter a death spiral, advances in healthcare (solutions for antibacterial resistance, new cancer treatments or preventions). The list goes on. Hard to see this launch being in quite the same category if I'm honest! But I'd be keen to hear your case.

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Space colonization will be a turning point in a way that few other events in history can match. A few million years from now no one will know what social reforms we came up with any more than we know about the dinosaurs. But they will be looking at our footprints on the moon.

Leaving our planet is equivalent to when life grew legs and crawled out of the oceans, or the invention of fire, perhaps the implications are even greater if we learn that the Fermi Paradox is real and we are one of the few to get around it.

As much as I'm a space nerd and avid sci-fi reader myself, I'm not that convinced. We have plenty of places on earth that are more hospitable and cheaper to get to compared to space, like the bottom of the ocean and mountain tops. Some of those places even have valuable metals to mine. And I don't see people rushing to live and work there. I'm not saying space colonization can't make sense, or that it won't happen. My gut feeling is, it will happen but not in the way we envision today, similar to the vision of flying cars. Where the technology is there to make it possible, but the economics make it impractical as of now. Also the whole biosphere destruction is not gonna put our focus elsewhere, except for those that want to flee into some expensive escape fantasy.

My guess is that for the most part, the moon or mars will remain uninhabited. It will eventually become a source for mining and launching cheaply trillions of tons of materials. Humans will only really "colonize" huge castles that can house billions, gigantic structures assembled in space from lunar materials and launched from magnetic rails, bit by bit, assembled directly in their useful orbits (cyclers maybe?). With bigger and bigger mirrors and solar panels pointed at the sun, there would probably be no limit at the distance those could be from the sun.

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