@GulliverFoyle Your reply makes several assumptions and tacks on a number of unnecessary burdens, seemingly to make your own opinion carry more weight.
Repeating myself, those colonies were designed back in the 70’s by experienced polymath engineers with existing technology in mind. Obviously, additional equipment would be needed, and it would need to be launched in orbit and towed around, but these are matters of developing a process using materials well-known at that time, not in commanding undiscovered laws of physics. They say this explicitly in their design notes and interviews. I recommend you read “Colonies in Space” T.A. Heppenheimer, which I have in my own collection. We can debate whether this is “developing new technology”, but again, I see it as primarily a matter of funding.
Your next paragraph probably speaks more to the reason why we won’t be doing this in the near future: your apathy, almost contempt for “…what? To put a bunch of people in space.” - as though that’s just silly, kids. Obviously, we need different sort of people working on this, who have the ambition to see this through.
Lastly, among others, I never said we would migrate our species en masse. A small number of actual people would be launched with the necessary delicacy, plus perhaps an ample supply of DNA to promote as much diversity in the first generations. The rest would all be born in space. There will surely be a point where there are more living humans in space than on Earth.
