* Tech billionaires, celebrities and others have taken up extraterrestrial space colonization as their latest PR hobby project.
* While human travel within the solar system may well be feasible and of interest, full-blown space colonization is an escapist fantasy.
* Placing our hopes for the human future in space colonization
1) is an irresponsible diversion from the serious work of ensuring that Earth remains a healthy abode indefinitely, and
2) lets the billionaires pose as visionary saviors rather than be seen as the ego-and-money-driven capitalists that they are.
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Space colonization has become a cause célèbre among billionaire entrepreneurs, celebrity scientists, futurists and techies. These space enthusiasts believe that the future of humanity lies not on this finite terrestrial speck but in the unbounded vastness of space. They argue that if we don't colonize space the human species will go extinct as the continued growth of material consumption in one manner or another triggers catastrophic ecosystem collapse. Rather than using this forecast to motivate living more lightly on the land, however, space enthusiasts argue that we can continue to grow, indeed forever, by moving to successive extra-terrestrial platforms: a terraformed Mars, large asteroids and the rocky outer planet moons, constructed mega-habitats orbiting the sun and eventually to similar platforms beyond our solar system and then beyond our galaxy. Many space enthusiasts acknowledge the logistic difficulties that this vision entails and propose as a more realistic alternative that we upload our minds onto picoscale computer chips and colonize the stars in vehicles no larger than a soccer ball, housing billions of colonists apiece and propelled by abundant solar wind energy.
Let's get real. Placing our hopes for the survival of humanity in extra-terrestrial colonization and/or uploading our minds onto computer chips is not evidence of bold, aspirational visionary genius. It's evidence of pathology.
It doesn't appear that a rigorous technical assessment of the practicability of extra-terrestrial colonization as a serious response to challenges facing the human community has ever been conducted. My hunch is that such a study would show that while human travel within our solar system may well be feasible, the prospects for permanent extra-terrestrial colonization are effectively nil. Talk of space colonization as a solution to real human challenges serves only to deflect attention from the real and difficult work we need to do to ensure us and our descendants a just, sustainable and technologically responsible human future on Earth.
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For more see the Working Paper Expanded Outline Sections II and III, Discussion Notes 34-35 and 53, and Attachment F.5.