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Sibling is right, "close enough" == "habitable surface that humans can live on without some life support". Aurora uses the generation ship model of transport, which . . does not go ideally. Many problems unforeseen for hundreds of years of travel in the utter empty (you hope desperately that it is empty). It's also a fast but not relativistic ship, .07C, at exorbitant energy costs. Hope you like the moon / mercury covered in purple lasers. Relativistic lower-mass vessels with the same technology, I guess, but the impact threat goes through the roof, and it's not a settlement ship. A better way to make the Aurora-style project is a small ship with frozen embryos that get birthed insitu by machines of loving grace. Then you can go faster, smaller. But it's all talk talk. We're technically capable of doing these things, but I'm not sure we're socially capable of even lunar settlement at this stage of our history. Let alone Mars, the outer system. The Expanse was, in its own way, optimistic about our future. They just had to get medieval to get Earth's gas balance (and probably phosphorous! and who knows what else) back in the normal range. Heh heh you know it's funny but if we took the solar system as it exists right now, a floating settlement higher up in the Venutian cloud layers would be closest[1] to fitting that bill, in terms of kgs of crap you need to carry around outside with you. Just, yknow, not anyone's typical idea of a "settlement". [1] And yet so very damn far away. |
Huh? As I recall, there were some lines in the show stating that Earth's population was significantly higher than it is now.
And, in fact, Earth could easily handle a much larger human population than it has now. The problem is, it can't handle a larger population (or even the same as now) if they all want to live like suburbanite Americans driving 6000-pound SUVs and living in McMansions. If everyone (except the farmers) lived in megacities that looked just like Tokyo, we wouldn't have the climate-warming problem we have now.
>I'm not sure we're socially capable of even lunar settlement at this stage of our history
I think we are, but not as a unified planetary population. One wealthy country, or better yet a bloc of allied wealthy nations, could do it if they really wanted to.
>a floating settlement higher up in the Venutian cloud layers would be closest to fitting that bill
I've thought about this before, and my conclusion is that this kind of colony just makes no sense. It's technically feasible, but the question is: why? What purpose would such a colony serve? A moon colony makes sense: you can do lots of stuff on the moon, like mining or astronomy or low-g manufacturing. What the heck are you going to do in a Venusian cloud city that makes it worthwhile for people from Earth to fund your colony? All colonies in history have required funding (and a lot of it), and that meant that investors were expecting a return somehow. There's no economic incentive to build cloud cities on Venus so people can sit around and play video games or whatever; there's absolutely no resources on Venus that are valuable or accessible.