[Arizhel]

>We have zero experience in building and living in actual offworld habitats.

It's too late to edit this, but I just want to qualify it: we have zero experience building and living in habitats on other celestial bodies. A small space station in low-Earth orbit within the Van Allen radiation-protection belts doesn't really count.

[robbiep]

sure. we don't have experience doing anything until we try. Ultimately it doesn't matter what you or I think about this: in the scheme of things (and not to channel musk, but it remains a fact) our species will blip out of existence unless we get off the planet.

Funding be damned. No one is asking you to work your arse off Interstellar style to fund a secret program to fund humanity and get us out of here. And no-one is asking the US government to pump a trillion into setting up colonies out there. But it will happen - and there will be commercial starts to it - asteroid mining, with initial small numbers of support personnel up there, then maybe a few habs. Maybe it will take generations; or maybe we'll be wiped out before then. But it is either part of the inevitable march of the story of our civilisation; or there won't be a civilisation to talk about