Exploring space should be a uniting purpose of humanity, but colonizing space, as humans live now, is just wildly, hilariously impractical. It would be orders of magnitude cheaper and easier to live at the bottom of the ocean, or under the antarctic ice sheet. And this is speaking as someone really into exotic rocketry and transcendental sci-fi.
As well as “farther future” but grounded Sci-Fi like Orion’s Arm, where humanity doesn’t really resemble its current form. And play KSP! The more you read and see, the more you realize “wow, sending humans through space is hard, and living there kinda doesn’t make sense right now.”
In making that attempt, we have to solve a lot of problems. How do we make a self-sustaining ecosystems where humans can live indefinitely? Can humans live that long in reduced gravity without issues? Can children be raised to healthy adulthood in reduced gravity? Is human pregnancy even possible there (probably is, but we don’t know that for sure)? Are there technologies or genetic engineering that we could use to solve the issues we encounter?
How do we mine asteroids? How do we manufacture things in zero gravity? How do we build the Internet to handle latency measured in minutes or hours or days?
These are all hard problems, but if they were easy, then they wouldn’t be interesting.
And I’d say the same for ocean colonies. That’s hard, too. Not quite as hard, but hard.
Two things:
That was kinda the dream after WWII, no?
Exploring space should be a uniting purpose of humanity, but colonizing space, as humans live now, is just wildly, hilariously impractical. It would be orders of magnitude cheaper and easier to live at the bottom of the ocean, or under the antarctic ice sheet. And this is speaking as someone really into exotic rocketry and transcendental sci-fi.
I’d recommend reading through Project Rho, if you’re interested: https://projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/
As well as “farther future” but grounded Sci-Fi like Orion’s Arm, where humanity doesn’t really resemble its current form. And play KSP! The more you read and see, the more you realize “wow, sending humans through space is hard, and living there kinda doesn’t make sense right now.”
Being hard is the point. (That’s what she said).
In making that attempt, we have to solve a lot of problems. How do we make a self-sustaining ecosystems where humans can live indefinitely? Can humans live that long in reduced gravity without issues? Can children be raised to healthy adulthood in reduced gravity? Is human pregnancy even possible there (probably is, but we don’t know that for sure)? Are there technologies or genetic engineering that we could use to solve the issues we encounter?
How do we mine asteroids? How do we manufacture things in zero gravity? How do we build the Internet to handle latency measured in minutes or hours or days?
These are all hard problems, but if they were easy, then they wouldn’t be interesting.
And I’d say the same for ocean colonies. That’s hard, too. Not quite as hard, but hard.