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How likely is it that we will be living on another planet in the near future?

SpaceLiving+2
Steve Turnbull
  · 737
phd @ princeton astro | haykh.github.io  · 17 янв 2017

Depends on what exactly do you mean by "living". NASA is planning Mars flights with colonists onboard for the near future. And the initial plan is that after a 5-year flight they're never going to return. The colonists will establish a base with all the necessary life-supporting facilities. It is, however, unclear how long will they be able to support themselves without any supplies from Earth. But in any case, a lot of time will be needed (like, maybe, centuries) for this colony to become a routine, so that people fly there for their winter vacations.

I suspect that besides Mars, it is highly unlikely that any human colony will be built on any other planet or satellite during the next several centuries. And I would be even more pessimistic and say that (at least during the next several centuries) humans will probably never get out of the Solar System, since even the nearest star is too far away for any interstellar flights.

The progress is not as fast as you might imagine it to be. There are physical hurdles - for example, the minimum size of the processors that we can build. So this exponential progress in computing technologies will stop very soon. Although we have smartphones that are much more powerful than all the computers that sent people to the Moon, distances in space grow exponentially. While the moon is just a week away, the Mars already is five years away from us. The velocities in all the cases are of the same order, since it's not the engine that determines the velocity of a spaceship, but it's the gravity.