We're one good new religion away from colonizing the solar system.
Cathedrals were built over 100s of years. Imaging just living in a massive one and your whole holy purpose is to survive and thrive and spread.
It's entirely reasonable we'd have the will to make it happen, and pretty reasonable we'd be able to build it with planet scale effort, but sadly quite difficult to imagine it surviving even dust impacts for 400 years.
Everything is consumed on such a voyage. If we can send a generation ship at 0.01c, we can send replacement parts quicker and probes ahead to verify our estimates even faster.
Are you just casually handwaving away sending a dockable resupply ship at 0.01c to somewhere in interstellar space, then doing some kind of rendesvous with it at 0.01c with a spaceship measured kilometers in length?
There's no free lunch. Every gram of mass that you want to get to interstellar space requires exactly as much fuel to get there as you'd have to add to the original spacecraft to just carry it.
(thought experiment - have them fly side by side, then connect them by string, then shorten the string until they touch, then weld them together - the fuel required doesn't change at any point).
And a shield + a resupply ship has a lot more grams than just adding the shield to the original thing.
> It's entirely reasonable we'd have the will to make it happen
"We" are not even able to sustainably inhabit our current planet. We have hundreds of millions starving every day, we have wars in many places, the threat of thermonuclear war looming as strong as ever, and are still using natural resources at an unsustainable rate even though we know that that's the case. Settling on other planets has all these problems plus the issue of getting there plus the issue that the environment you find there is more hostile than the most hostile desert areas here on earth.
We currently live on paradise planet and can't even make things work well around here. Hard to see how you could make things work on Mars where you can't just go outside pick a leaf to eat and get some water to drink. Or just, you know, breathe.
We do not have hundreds of millions starving every day.
And if we did, we don't have a large portion of industrialized/militarized missions starving every day anway.
We'd send the best of the best, hand picked, with the best tech we can build.
It's fine if you believe we should not go (but I disagree), but the state of the world is not evidence of failure of the mission.
> We do not have hundreds of millions starving every day.
Then maybe it's time you stop being ignorant. It's not even hard to google. Start with the WHO, over 700 million people faced hunger and malnutrition in 2023. [1] And I'm not particularly interested in how you will try to nitpick your way out of that. It's so easy in the west and in upper classes of the developing world to close your eyes to this.
> And if we did, we don't have a large portion of industrialized/militarized missions starving every day anway. We'd send the best of the best, hand picked, with the best tech we can build.
Initially, sure. But that's not what I was talking about. Eventually you want to build a civilization there, right? Eventually you have millions there. And it's hard to see how you will be able to organize a society in large scale in a way that does not have the problems humankind currently has if you can't even fix that here which compared to all other planets is a nature paradise. Even after a thermonuclear war, earth is easier to live on than any other planet in this solar system. Time to leave your scifi bubble if you believe otherwise.
> It's fine if you believe we should not go (but I disagree), but the state of the world is not evidence of failure of the mission.
The state of the world is evidence of failure of a mission that is much easier than building a civilization on another planet.
We are a life form that triggered major environmental crisis and is trying to adapt to it at unprecedented speed that no other life form achieved in the past. Our base line for being able to make changes isn’t science fiction but couple billions of history of life on this planet. Our goals are ambitious but we are doing surprisingly well. Just not as we want it to happen.
Cathedrals were built over 100s of years. Imaging just living in a massive one and your whole holy purpose is to survive and thrive and spread.
It's entirely reasonable we'd have the will to make it happen, and pretty reasonable we'd be able to build it with planet scale effort, but sadly quite difficult to imagine it surviving even dust impacts for 400 years.