Obviously we don’t send a group without making it not certain death first. But the person I was responding to said that it would be reliant on Earth, which, yeah, you can’t realistically develop a fully self reliant economy without making a reliant economy first.
My first question is: would you be enthusiastic about the concept of a lunar colony?
My second question is: what kinds of things do you think are viable for a colony made within the next 50 years?
I think Starship makes colonies a whole lot more viable, once they iron out the issues, but I generally don't know enough to answer your second question.
How long do you think it takes to plan a trip to the moon?
> I think Starship makes colonies a whole lot more viable
Why?
Starship’s goal is to drop cost of mass to orbit by a couple of orders of magnitude, if they pull that off, it would drop the cost of supporting a colony by quite a bit.