Is it really necessary to send humans to those places just to get the knock-on benefits? Couldn’t we do those things directly, without going there?
It seems to me that, today, those who have the money to spend on these endeavors would only do so if there were perceived short-term benefits to themselves. That means they plan to exploit the resources, or increase their own power somehow.
I know the good engineers that make this happen are doing it for the challenge and in the pursuit of knowledge, and I know that’s why we poors support it, but that doesn’t “pay the bills.” What is the motivation behind the money? Why are they really doing this?
I’ve lost hope that we can ever get to the scale of moving and living anywhere else, not in time before things get worse and resources are scarce. See the start of Interstellar, but without the secret NASA still working on stuff and any extraterrestrial help. So a Earth dying while we fight over scraps. Or the Bladerunner universe but without anything off world, just what we see.
But… if we could find that window and get out there. I still think Gerard O’Neill’s ideas are sound. Gravitational wells can be useful for some resources, definitely great for science, but why go back there once you get into space? Energy-wise it’s stupid. There’s a lot of work and research still on how best to make space habitats safe from radiation and other effects from being away from Earth, but they aren’t unsolvable, it just takes being out there and working at it.
The plus is that once we can build one, we have the whole solar system to use, not just a few planets and moons. Collecting sunlight, or making our own, is the only limit. An old National Geographic on this had one artist concept of a habitat far out past the gas giants, and it was a huge mirror assembly with the habitat as a small speck in the middle. Of course getting around will still take a long time unless we break through with fusion or better, but again, being out there will make us work on that more to improve it.
But that’s if we can stop doing some of what we’re doing on this planet long enough to make the first steps. I don’t see it… but stand to be proven wrong and would be ecstatic to see what we almost started in the 1970s.