[victorbjorklund]

Doesn't living on a boat in the middle of Atlantic do the same? Or on a remote island in the middle of nowhere? Or in the middle of nowhere in the amazons or Siberia? Probably not the most comfortable places but probably more comfortable than space.

[cosmic_cheese]

Those places are too accessible and too easy for major existing powers to lay claim to if a new settlements there start to thrive. This is especially true for any place on dry land (you really think Russia would allow independence of an economically healthy and growing city-state in Siberia? Fat chance).

Basically every square inch of Earth has effectively been spoken for already save for the oceans, but nation states will still happily invent reasons why they actually control the plot you’ve put your city on (“some tiny island in the vicinity is under ours, thus so is your city!”) or maybe just won’t bother with pretext at all and threaten military action unless you comply.

All that becomes much less practical in space, and the further out you go the less likely it is that Earth based powers will bother you (especially if we never invent the efficient significant-fraction-of-light-speed engines that enable the plot of The Expanse).

Now of course going out there introduces all sorts of other problems, but existing power interference is not among them.

[victorbjorklund]

Yeah, but we're not talking about cities. There will be a lot of time before you can establish a city with thousands of people on another planet. What we're talking about here is the first step where you and a few people go into space with a very uncomfortable spaceship and maybe establish a base on a planet which is probably just gonna have the bare minimum to survive. We're not talking about cities in our lifetime. So at that point if you're one of the first going you are not going to a city. So you're really living in more luxury in the wilderness of Siberia or the Amazon and the government there is not gonna bother you if you are just living there alone in the middle of nowhere interacting with nobody because the goal was to get away from all the politics and stuff.

[cosmic_cheese]

Right, but usually part of the end goal of going out to settle a frontier isn’t just to get away from the status quo, but to build something bigger in the process. You’re right that governments aren’t going to care about just you living out in the middle of nowhere, but they will care once it grows into something significant, and that renders the whole thing moot. No point in building something up if it’s guaranteed to be snatched away.

Of course, that can happen to some off-world settlement that took generations to build too, but it’s not a given and your chances of retaining sovereignty are much better.