A friend of mine is a big advocate of space habitats. Apparently they are far superior to Mars as a place where we could expand in foreseeable future. Maybe someone knowledgeable could chime in?
Closer. Easier to repair (parts are not billions of miles/months away) and resupply.
As a destination Mars is less hospitable than say the top of Mt Everest. And far harder to get to. For an easier visualization, imagine an orbiting space habitat vs a Mt Everest peak habitat.
> A friend of mine is a big advocate of space habitats. Apparently they are far superior to Mars...
Interesting...did he work at NASA working with real space habitats? I was a summer hire at NASA many moons ago in the medical/habitat programs and there sure wasn't much their that looked superior to anything.
The question is: Do you really want to leave earth, the only habitat for us humans (and other species) that is accessible to us? Live will change and evolve under other conditions; as such, earth is our home, and unique.
I propose saving this planet, and not messing up another one.
Because the habitat can be a great place to live. With all the comfort we are used to have here on Earth, but all the resources collectable at space.
And if they are discriminatory, you gather an asteroid and build another one. More than 99% of the difficulty is gone just by the fact that you are not on a planet's surface.
We are, of course, far from being able to build such things.
These days people prefer to live either in suburbia in Mediterranean climate or in old capitals (think Paris and London). That's a definite trend - we no longer have colonization of new spaces, we instead have consolidation in known good places.
One can perhaps start a commune in a forest or on an island even today, with handpicked people, but it doesn't happen.
Wanting to flee from Earth with all its problems is understandable, but I fear that we'll repeat a lot of bad stuff in habitats. Think totalitarian cults, slavery, plain old totalitarism.
Think about a place with a terrain build to be perfect for living, with perfectly planned ratios to water and land (perfectly distributed), controlled temperature into what the community decides is best (with the possibility of temperature zones), and finely controlled rain, wind and "sun" incidence so that it can be sunny on your pool area but still raining on the crops just near it. Oh, and also think about something reasonably big.
No idea how we may get people there, neither socially of physically, but this is what is possible. I'm also in no rush to get there, but we will someday, because it is just too tempting. (More because of energy availability than any of the above paragraph.)
Can you please elaborate on the resources in space? There is better solar energy but what else? I intuitively would have expected resources to be far better on Mars.
The huge theoretical bottleneck on life is energy. This is the only one you need to "expend" on some way, any other resource you just need "enough".
But for the others, with just a reasonably low delta-v and some patience you can get into cubic kilometers of unclaimed raw resources for extending your habitat. You just have to know how to use them (what we currently don't).
You'll certainly get a bigger density of material resources on any planet, but then you will be trapped inside a gravitational wheel and must spend all that delta-v again to break free from it once it's completely claimed. For the short term (to the point that any timeframe is "short" in this discussion) small moons and big asteroids are probably the best places to colonize.
