Terraforming the Solar System

[Malenfant]

Originally Posted by combatmedic

Most of the successful colonial ventures in the Early Modern Era were state sponsored, BTW. And those were on a planet where you can breathe the air and drink the water in most places, and grow food out of the ground. Mars and Venus are NOT equivalents to North America in the 17th Century, no matter how cool 'space pilgrims' sounds. :)

If it does ever get cheap enough to ship people off planet en masse though, then you can bet that there'd be a lot of people wanting to start new societies out there without the existing ones on Earth getting in the way.

Personally I don't think terraforming will happen - it's too long term and too much effort. It's much easier to build a space station (though an o'neill cylinder is still beyond our current tech).