[not_a_cop75]

It seems like it would be much easier to terraform the real estate around us than try to opt for something 100 light years away.

Mars has a leaky atmosphere - sure it's a real fixer upper. But we have a better chance of fixing it, or even correcting the orbit of our planet so that in 500 million years it's still livable.

[jacobsenscott]

Even easier is to stop digging stuff up and burning it. But we can't even do that.

[AnIdiotOnTheNet]

Christ, why even go to Mars? Even in the worst cases the damage we do to Earth will still leave it significantly more hospitable than Mars.

[grumpy8]

Or sending a HUGE human civilization spaceship somewhere.. maybe it will outlast the earth?

[cthalupa]

In a lot of ways, living on spaceships/space stations/other artificial constructions is likely a better path forward than looking to colonize new planets in general. O'Neill cylinders are quite practical, and with advances in technology that seem likely to occur, even larger projects like Bishop rings should be doable. They can be linked together to form constellations, and have enough free floating resources within the solar system to be able to build enough of them to support populations in the trillions.

It probably sounds less than ideal to you and me, vs. living on a planet, but it probably wouldn't be so bad to someone born in that sort of environment and is used to it.

With that in mind, I don't know if it makes sense to try and find human habitable planets, vs. just places with lots of raw material we can use. Unless there's alien life we want to go meet up with, at any rate.

[grumpy8]

>> It probably sounds less than ideal to you and me, vs. living on a planet, but it probably wouldn't be so bad to someone born in that sort of environment and is used to it.

Yeah, and also at some point, it won't matter what's ideal or not.. it'll be about survival.

[not_a_cop75]

O'Neill cylinders are so practical that most of this stuff we have no idea how to practically accomplish.

Edit: The sizes involved for launch would present no less than a hundred trillion budget at the moment.

[cthalupa]

I mean practical in that there's no exotic science required. Everything required we have ideas on how to accomplish now, and the big issues are making it cost effective.

And as for the 100 trillion budget, if you're launching from the earth, sure. Geologists are pretty sure the moon has plenty of materials useful for building stuff. We've already built mass drivers, and the physics for building one that could launch raw materials from the moon are perfectly sound.

Yes, we need to figure out mining materials and building stuff in space. But we're going to have to figure that out anyway if we want to survive as a species in the long term, and there's plenty of advantages in starting to figure that out now, especially since we're staring down the barrel of a gun vis-a-vis climate change.

[fluffything]

Or creating our own planet at an appropriate orbit somewhere.