[AtlasBarfed]

Jeez, they invented the core tech in the 60s. An orion pulse nuclear ship can get a small city to Jupiter in a month.

You don't need a wonder technology to cart around the solar system, well, unless you are talking ECONOMICAL technology.

I'm not sure how expensive H-bombs are to make at scale.

[tsimionescu]

I'm not talking just about transportation, I'm also talking about the technology required to make an actually self-sustaining human colony anywhere outside the Earth. That is the part that only exists in principle - when you go to the details, we don't actually have any idea how we could build even a Mars colony that is truly self-sustaining, never mind one on a more inhospitable world.

Note that when I say self-sustaining, I don't just mean power, food, air, and water. I mean everything that a high-tech colony actually needs - plastics, machined parts, microprocessors, software, and so on.