On the heels of Artemis II, our cultural obsession with space colonization continues, even as we face increasing global resource constraints and planetary health declines. Techno-optimists, including some of the wealthiest among us, dream of a future where we mine, travel to, and colonize other planets – all in the hopes of bypassing the problems we now face on Earth. But from the perspective of physics and ecology, how feasible is space colonization – and are these interplanetary ambitions blinding us to the miracle of the planetary spaceship we already inhabit?
i live one of the retorts, when Nate says commenters often say “we’ll just science the shit out if it and overcome obstacles” and the reply from the guests is, “if we science the shit out if it, we’d relalise how stupid it was”