Solis got me started
(by bringing up GW and Mars)
I have this lovely sci-fi fantasy world kicking around in the back of my mind where we start moving off the planet, not to mars or some other planet but to lots and lots of places we build, put wherever we feel like building putting them. (Outside the "flight lanes", of course).
I like the idea of the next big project being the space elevator, which would make it far more economically feasible to get stuff up out of the gravity well. Something like that would be needed to make commerce affordable, seems to me, but if we just built the device to make travel halfway easy and afordable, we could just colonize the space itself.
There's a lot of rock out there, and lots of free solar power to melt and shape it with. And it would give us a way to have space enough to live in, without some huge precentage of us dying off or not reproducing.
It may not be so far off, for the cost of things like waste disposal and food production to get high enough that it would be profitable to do it "offshore", so to speak. If we can get industry out there doing something profitable, and rich folks out there for tourism and the most secure castles to be had, the land developers will be not far behind, and we will once again have frontier to go to if we want.
And Industry would have room to road without ruining the place for the rest of us.
I have this lovely sci-fi fantasy world kicking around in the back of my mind where we start moving off the planet, not to mars or some other planet but to lots and lots of places we build, put wherever we feel like building putting them. (Outside the "flight lanes", of course).
I like the idea of the next big project being the space elevator, which would make it far more economically feasible to get stuff up out of the gravity well. Something like that would be needed to make commerce affordable, seems to me, but if we just built the device to make travel halfway easy and afordable, we could just colonize the space itself.
There's a lot of rock out there, and lots of free solar power to melt and shape it with. And it would give us a way to have space enough to live in, without some huge precentage of us dying off or not reproducing.
It may not be so far off, for the cost of things like waste disposal and food production to get high enough that it would be profitable to do it "offshore", so to speak. If we can get industry out there doing something profitable, and rich folks out there for tourism and the most secure castles to be had, the land developers will be not far behind, and we will once again have frontier to go to if we want.
And Industry would have room to road without ruining the place for the rest of us.