Quote:
Originally Posted by photon
I'm more pessimistic, the resources and engineering to support colonies on the moon or Mars are far off, and if the goal is to get the eggs out of one basket, putting up a colony that is completely dependent on Earth for survival doesn't accomplish that, it just makes the current basket even harder to support.
We can hardly keep the ISS going.
If we want to be able to colonize space, first we're going to need robotic technology FAR better than what we have. When we can build a robot factory that can go out and mine an asteroid for resources by itself (including stuff necessary to support life like oxygen and water and such), I think we're wasting our time trying to establish lunar or Mars colonies.
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Yes we are a long ways off and I totally agree we need a lot better robotics before we can do anything. Problem is we don't have the focused research effort right now to get us anywhere close to what we need to travel anywhere other than potential lunar and martian colonies and relying on a market driven research effort hasn't gotten us any further in years. Slowly and irreversibly destroying the Earth is about the only thing I can think of that will provide that kind of focus and kick start the process to get out of the current basket. Though we're probably killing the planet a bit too fast for us to save ourselves anyways.