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by SideburnsOfDoom
3358 days ago
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> This technology removes the main moral argument and technological difficulty against extra-solar travel as presented in the book. Not quite. The other difficulty presented is the sparsity of places suitable to settle at. And what you do then if you're not very lucky on arrival. |
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Option 1: Go to sleep and go home.
Option 2: Setup a small research station in a spun up asteroid and get terraforming.
Option 2 is much nicer with cryo-sleep. Try a terraforming experiment and sleep for 50 years to see how it worked out. You can even cycle people between Earth and the research station (see the plot of Alien). Planetary Geologists can live their lives on geologic time scales.
Or you could improve your odds by sending robots or small teams to many different stars (sleep, explore, sleep). You don't need to bring a full-cycle ecosystem until you decide to stay. Find good planetary sites and then send over the supplies.
My read of Aurora was that interstellar colonization was about to take place, but the PoV characters were against it.