this post was submitted on 01 Jan 2026
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Your list of other places to colonize are easier than a difference of one atmosphere and controllable environment? That's funny. I never implied it would be easy, I said the opposite, and getting into space is a big part of that. And there are dangers to figure out. But a hull leak in space is far safer than even a few hundred meters under water.
Yes. Dramatically.
You can ship stuff to any place on Earth trivially. Need a new building for a colony? Float it over, drop it in the ocean. Food? Fuel? Medicine? Send it. You get a free mass to pull/dump heat, oxygen is never far away. You have rock and water to process. You have free radiation shielding! You have tons of mass budged to just store supplies and spare parts you might need.
It's like a paradise, even in hellish Earth conditions.
But space?
You have nothing.
Sending anything to LEO is orders of magnitude more expensive than, say, sinking it into Hawaii's volcano. Or drilling it a mile into ice. Forget places that are light seconds (or light hours) away.
Heat? Has to be dumped with huge radiators, limiting how much you can produce. Air? Water? Fuel? Parts? You have what's with you, and that's it. There's no mass budget for heavy manufacturing equipment, no easy supply chain for any of the equipment keeping you alive.
As a human, assuming zero G is engineered away, you just have to deal with tons of radiation, and pay a huge price for a shielded core to sleep/hide in. Plants you bring along get irradiated too, though a closed loop food/waste cycle is the easy part. There's no mass to push against, no place for heat to float away if there's suddenly a fire or power outage, and you have X amount of fuel before your craft is stuck.
If it's anything like the Saturn V, the mass:fuel ratio of your craft is something like a full aluminum coke can. Paper-thin metal is all that keeps your 1 atmosphere and explosive fuel in, whereas anywhere on the ground, you can get orders of magnitude more mass and dump it anywhere. Imagine having to build a car or a hospital or whatever out of gold leaf instead of steel and concrete; that's the kind of engineering challenge you're dealing with.
...To reiterate, I think Star Trek like shows where people can just walk around the hull, or even (relatively) short term mission like Apollo 11 or the ISS, give people a bad idea what actual colonization in space would involve. There is no Enterprise, there's not even a Rocinante no matter how advanced civilization gets: transcendent civilizations would still have ships that are basically all engine, and space stations that are just temporary until humans don't really resemble humans anymore: https://www.orionsarm.com/eg-topic/45bbe204d461e
And I don't want to sound like I'm against space missions. Space telescopes? Moon bases? Awesome! Fund it. They're great ideas.
But forget sustainable unaugmented human habitation. Forget ever being able to live offworld without massive support from Earth. Physics simply do not allow it, and we won't even resemble humans anymore by the time its practical.