this post was submitted on 10 Jul 2023
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I don't know if it will happen in the next century, but we definitely should focus on moon and Mars colonies before thinking about leaving the solar system. I'm 48 and would love if we had a moon colony in my lifetime. At the very least some station where astronauts have an extended stay like they do on ISS.
@saba @Recant We're definitely not going to have a moon colony in our lifetime, and a manned mars mission would only be a disaster.
The reason we haven't really gone back to the moon and don't have a colony there is because it's much more expensive to access and offers no real benefit over space stations. It's perk is low gravity instead of microgravity, but it trades off in massively increased fuel and time costs as well as the inability to "dodge" hazards. The moon has no special resources, no capacity for terraforming, and if we were wanting to build enclosed habitats we could do that more easily in a space station.
Mars is kinda worse because as far as I can tell we're finding problems faster than we're finding solutions. My favorite recent example of this is that we discovered anyone we sent would go blind before reaching the planet (microgravity destroys your vision over time, it took us forever to find out because the astronauts were hiding it so they wouldn't be disqualified from future flights).
Why does microgravity cause blindness?
We don't know yet https://youtube.com/watch?v=zXq5Uu1rRtA
The most livable place outside of the Earth is in the upper atmosphere of Venus. It's way closer to the Earth. And air pirates would sail through clouds of sulfuric acid on their steampunk zeppelins.
49 here, and I was always hopeful that I'd see us make it to another solar system in my lifetime. Another planet in our solar system would still be great, though!