[StireFarter]

Hand-wavy predictions like this scare me - it suggests people don't understand space travel or the distances involved at all.

Sure, if you think of the Earth as a game of SimCity plus Kerbal Space Program, these discussions about exponential growth are interesting. However, they miss the part where the intervening 30-100 years become literal hell on Earth while space travel ramps up.

[adastra22]

I started my career at NASA. I'm working on an asteroid mining startup. I'm well aware of the vastness of space :)

The GP said 400 years. That's the time since the age of exploration until now. That's a vast era of time, and exponential technology development goes both ways.