I fully agree. Personally I don't think we'll ever have an extended manned presence anywhere farther away than the Moon. We might visit Mars in the next century, maybe, but a colony surviving there is pure fantasy.
It's been 63 years ago since the first human visited the orbit around earth. Since then, development and research happens faster and faster. We now even have commercial companies who are developing space crafts for humans.
I don't think we've seen even the beginning of how things will unfold. Just 100 years will render a huge difference from today, and today we're already doing things that were unthinkable ~20 years ago (like reusable rockets).
Commercial space flight will become mainstream as soon as it becomes viable to profit from it. Probably via asteroid or moon mining. At that point motivation to be in space will hit its peak. Let's not forget why humans went to orbit and the moon in the first place.
Just a couple hundred years ago, Settlers who risked their lives and spent several months on cutting edge technology (aka wooden sail
boats) to find “new” land would like to have a word.
It's also a bit poetic in that it took 30-60 days to sail from Europe to the New World. When Mars is aligned with Earth, the travel time will be similar. For example, New Horizons was able to reach Mars in 39 days.
Am I missing something? New Horizons didn’t go to Mars, right?
According to this, it also crossed the orbit of mars 78 days after launch, and at that point, it was closer to earth than mars:
I'm with you. Unfortunately. The older I get, the more I realise just how hard, far and pointless existing beyond the Earth's atmosphere will be, for the most part.
Certainly the next few hundred years. There's just no real point. Ten thousand years hence, who knows?
I'm absolutely rapt following SpaceX's journey, but then when I mentally scale that up to 'something useful' for localspace living (eg. a useful percentage of current daily aviation volume), I realise how utterly unsustainable it fundamentally is.
The older I get, the less of a Paradox Fermi's idle thought becomes. Sadly.
Given how much future is left (a whole lot), I don't really understand why some people seem so confident that humanity is just going to stay on Earth forever. Are you assuming industrial civilization will collapse? It's certainly possible, but I don't think it's a given.
