Terraforming the Solar System

[combatmedic]

Originally Posted by Malenfant

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).

Yup, and even space habiats are a bit goofy if we go beyond a certain size. There's really no reason to build gigantic cities in space. Robot factories? Yes. Huge cities? Why? Just build the huge city on Earth. That's much cheaper. We are very far from running out of open space.

Technology ( or magic) like Traveller gravitics and jump drive would change a lot of things, of course. I agree that they make terraforming even less likely, though, because human beings would be able to go in search of earthlike world much more cheaply than trying to 'fix' uninhabitable planets like Mars or Venus.