The most efficient way to colonize space is with self replicating robots/factories. Human settlement is probably going to be more of an afterthought, or along the lines of on-site repair and teleoperations personnel for the robots doing the heavy lifting. The concept of slave labor in orbital mining colonies doesn’t make much sense outside of science fiction.
Once a certain critical mass has been reached in terms of having systems that can convert raw space materials (asteroids, lunar regolith, and so on) to more useful configurations of their raw elements (metal, solar panels, breathable air, and so on) it will make more sense to set up habitats. These will probably be between planets, not on planets.
This will have some positive consequences and some negative where x-risk is concerned. On the negative side, access to high energy weapons is almost an inherent part of being in space, since it is relatively easy to create high velocity projectiles (gravity alone adds huge amounts of energy to any sizable object, including the sun’s gravity), and sterilizing the entire planet will be more plausible than even nuclear weaponry.
On the positive side, we will have decentralized our population and have the ability to survive if the earth itself is rendered uninhabitable. We will also likely develop more easily decentralized types of manufacturing tech which will protect against supply chain disruption, thus reducing economic paths of civilizational decline.
It is also worth noting that the earth’s carrying capacity can essentially be extended, guarding against overpopulation, by returning refined materials and/or energy from space, once the level of off-planet industrial growth hits a point where it becomes profitable to do so. So even from the perspective of people who want to stay on earth forever, there is incentive to develop this. You can also use it to guard against asteroid impacts, but that’s a relatively minor gain compared to the rest of the picture.
The most efficient way to colonize space is with self replicating robots/factories. Human settlement is probably going to be more of an afterthought, or along the lines of on-site repair and teleoperations personnel for the robots doing the heavy lifting. The concept of slave labor in orbital mining colonies doesn’t make much sense outside of science fiction.
Once a certain critical mass has been reached in terms of having systems that can convert raw space materials (asteroids, lunar regolith, and so on) to more useful configurations of their raw elements (metal, solar panels, breathable air, and so on) it will make more sense to set up habitats. These will probably be between planets, not on planets.
This will have some positive consequences and some negative where x-risk is concerned. On the negative side, access to high energy weapons is almost an inherent part of being in space, since it is relatively easy to create high velocity projectiles (gravity alone adds huge amounts of energy to any sizable object, including the sun’s gravity), and sterilizing the entire planet will be more plausible than even nuclear weaponry.
On the positive side, we will have decentralized our population and have the ability to survive if the earth itself is rendered uninhabitable. We will also likely develop more easily decentralized types of manufacturing tech which will protect against supply chain disruption, thus reducing economic paths of civilizational decline.
It is also worth noting that the earth’s carrying capacity can essentially be extended, guarding against overpopulation, by returning refined materials and/or energy from space, once the level of off-planet industrial growth hits a point where it becomes profitable to do so. So even from the perspective of people who want to stay on earth forever, there is incentive to develop this. You can also use it to guard against asteroid impacts, but that’s a relatively minor gain compared to the rest of the picture.