This is probably a good place for this review by Cory D.:
Kelly and Zach Weinersmith’s “A City On Mars” (no onebox for that link)
I am a million times more comfortable with the possible loss of a few astronauts who specifically chose, understand and accepted the risks of space exploration than I am with any of the current military clusterfucks that seem to involve dropping or throwing bombs on children.
NASA doesn’t have much influence on whether or not nations go to war.
NASA does have a lot of influence over what kinds of space exploration they undertake and how many lives they endanger in the process. So holding NASA accountable for the agency’s own choices in that regard seems pretty reasonable to me.
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Tell me more about the leg pillow suit!
saw a lengthy interview with Zach Weinersmith talking about the book, right out of their kitchen; it was informative, reasonable and funny as fuck 
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100% agreed.
After I read this comment I tried to imagine a good future, one where humanity or it’s chosen descendants survive and thrive long-term (more than another millennium without a global civilizational collapse, let’s say, even though my own concept of long-term is much longer than that), but where we never live anywhere but Earth. I can imagine such a thing, but it’s a really strained scenario near the edge of believability. Even then, I think it involves a lot of space-based automated infrastructure to support a ground-based civilization.
as far as Im concerned, we already live in the best world. planet earth is the most suitable for us and fullfills all our needs, because we evolved on it and we are as perfectly adujsted to it as evolution gets on this beautiful planet in the perfect goldilocks zone. try find that in a reasonable distance in the galaxy.
and it will be over in 500 million years and thats ok. hopefully we had a great time till then.
I think the differences in how we’re imagining these scenarios are much deeper than blog comments can resolve. But I figured I’d point to one of the paths I find plausible. I will say that if we don’t get our act together here on Earth, and fast, then none of anything else matters, because I doubt we’d make it another few centuries at best, and could drive ourselves extinct in my lifetime at worst.
First, I agree, of course we’re not going to find habitable worlds nearby. I wouldn’t be surprised if there aren’t any others in the galaxy, at all. But to my thinking, the kind of civilization that’s ready to attempt interstellar travel wouldn’t be looking for habitable worlds, at all. They’d be building them. First, they’d develop autonomous space-based mining and manufacturing, initially with the justification of obtaining rare elements, then of reducing the ecological damage of mining, then of moving more energy consumption off-world to increase total available power. Second, they’d start disassembling any and all potentially dangerous asteroids and Oort cloud objects as a means of long-term self-preservation. This would eventually give them about a dozen OOMs more matter, energy, and computational capacity than they could realistically have planet-side.
Third, they start sending probes beyond the solar system capable of doing the same there, but with a view to terraforming, or if feasible constructing (say if they figure out some form of starlifting), habitable worlds (or maybe they start with some other bodies in our own solar system). Almost none would succeed, but some could. The actual fraction of civilizational resources needed for this would, by then, be negligible, to the point that it becomes more of a “why not?” then a “why bother?” Keep in mind that evolution managed to terraform Earth from a volcanic hellscape with literally zero guiding intelligence.
This might take many thousands or even millions of years, but who cares? At some point in all this we figure out enough biology that aging and lifespan become a choice rather than an inevitability. I don’t know what that does to a culture, but I imagine a civilization of people with centuries- or millennia-long lives would be a lot more farsighted on average, and would build up a lot more skills over the course of those lives.
As for Earth being perfect for us because we evolved here… that’s not how evolution works? If nothing else, we only really evolved in the Great Rift Valley or thereabouts. Our ability to adapt to anywhere else as fast as we did is an evolutionary accident, and a triumph of intelligence, language and culture. Nature isn’t perfect. Nature doesn’t care. Our future is up to us, no matter how ill-prepared we are to deal with that reality.
Why? I’d be surprised if there weren’t thousands. There are 100 Billion or more stars.
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Also very possible. But if I got a magic message from the distant future that told me, “Nope, turns out there aren’t any, you missed a few key variables that are really rare,” I would not be too terribly surprised.
Edit to add: frankly I’d hope if our descendants did find a habitable world, they deliberately would avoid colonizing it. It probably has its own life at that point , and I’d rather they not destroy that.
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I’d be surprised if there were any other planets in our galaxy that would be ready for humans to move in “as-is” simply because we exist as one component of a highly complex interdependent biome.
Even with billions of candidates to choose from it would be like trying to find a compatible organ donor; the best scenario would be “we can stay alive here but the biological incompatibilities are likely going to create a lot of complications.”
Creating a new home from scratch by transplanting large amounts of biomass from Earth? Maybe, but I’m not going to move to one of Elon’s Mars colonies until someone actually builds a proof-of-concept habitat on Earth that can sustain life for decades at a time in a hermetically closed system.
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No kidding! I wouldn’t trust anyone alive claiming they’re even trying for something like that yet.
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I mean, I assume there are no planets we can move to as-is because we are incredibly finicky. Like, say there’s an atmosphere at 100 kPa, 280 K with 78% nitrogen, 21% oxygen, 1% argon, and 0.1% trace gases. A miraculously precise copy of ours – so safe to breathe outside?
I haven’t told you nearly enough to judge. Maybe those traces include carbon monoxide, which is an instant deal breaker, or radon, which is a slower but still critical one. Maybe the gases are just right but the place is covered in chrysotile so you’d just wreck your lungs anyway. Maybe you shouldn’t have ignored that I didn’t give a velocity in those figures. It doesn’t really take much.
I can believe there are other places suitable for life that formed there, but not glibly assume there is anywhere close enough for us to adapt. We are going to be in domes wherever we go.
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And of course that assumes we can even figure out how to build domes that can support human life indefinitely without regular resupply from Earth’s biosphere, which is a tall order.
A lot of people look at space colonies as an engineering challenge but I have a hunch that tackling the basic mechanics of getting people and equipment to another planetary body (or even another solar system) is going to be child’s play compared to the biological challenges of maintaining a self-contained biosphere that can keep those humans alive over the long term.
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Kim Stanley Robinson’s Aurora covers this territory pretty convincingly, throwing cold water on the idea that humans can thrive in any artificial or alien environments.
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thats funny. actually, that would very much so surprise me.
what would be the point then?
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I don’t know. Maybe someday the domes will be nice enough to stay in anyway, and we will find places worth being for other reasons, so some will care to go. Maybe not. Research colonies are the only obvious case for me, but it’s a lot of future to predict into. When you say 500 million years – that’s a jawless proto-fish trying to figure out what modern humans might want.
I am sure though that @Brainspore is right and if someone were actually interested in humans settling in space, they would be working on the domes first. All the other answers really depend on how that works out, and that’s something better figured out on earth anyway.
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Reminds me of these words of wisdom:
We have well over a hundred million years to colonize space, will the hundred or so years it’s going to take to mend our broken culture at home make a difference?
“Waah, it’s too late-- the sun has engulfed the Earth, and we were so close to reaching the stars. If only that 2025-2100 period wasn’t wasted arresting global warming and creating lasting peace!”
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I don’t think that the solution was especially plausible but Cixin Liu’s short story The Wandering Earth touched on that too. The sun is going to explode and scientists decide that evacuating earth and replicating our biosphere on another planet isn’t possible, so they invent some huge fusion-powered engines and take the whole planet on a multigenerational journey to another star. Apparently they also made a big-budget action movie based on the story but I didn’t see it.
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