In this case it really is a money sucking fantasy - and so fundamentally different to any prior colonizations that there are no valid comparisons. The Americas presented readily exploitable economic opportunities using already existing technologies based on true abundance of familiar resources, earning real returns - extraordinary returns - for the homeland.
Colonising space is not viable and the principle reason is extreme costs. When asteroid resources worth $10,000 per ton raw and unprocessed exist in great abundance, that contain materials worth millions per ton with refining cost so much to exploit that they are not worth the effort the barrier to doing it isn't shortsighted parochialism by people like me. The same level of costs that makes asteroid PGM's not worth the effort makes colonies non-viable, only much more so.
I think your "expand or perish" view of human progress is naive and simplistic and false; there are multiple motivations for advancing technology, including space capabilities without depending on those unrealistic ambitions and exaggerated expectations.
You seem not to have not the slightest clue of either history or physics, that you keep on proving! Learn, please!
The "extreme" costs, or as Stephen Hawking among others have put it, the "extinction" costs, are the costs of not doing it! Money is a token of energy! What is the world's deficit(!), the world's sink(!) . . . the world's ever increasing debit and debt?! Your technological understanding, and understanding of history and shrinking distances via increasing energy, structure and infrastructure complexity, is that mankind never advanced beyond the Stone Age and dugout canoes! Really it is not due for birth and breakout to Space, it is overdue, the same as the Earth is becoming overdue for the next 'Ice Age' of Earth!
The chips in our computer systems, among other technologies, are 'Space Age' technologies! Our shrinking the distances of the planet are advancements to 'Space Age' expansion! Our ever increasing conflicts, and rising virulence of those conflicts, those strange attractors of chaos, vast movements across the landscape of the planet, both local and remote, bespeak no civilization . . . bespeak a due time of birth to new frontiers outside Earth, else a new Dark Age of Un-Civilization! And Ken Fabian, among many others, I will continue to take the part of a composite Old Testament Biblical 'Moses' calling for Genesis, Space (island) 'Arks', and Exodus! You (you people in a generality of the blind) are deliberately blindly facing and bringing on everything Hawking and all the other futurist prophets have been prophesizing for a century and more!
If you seek a war, a total war, a world war, the take out of civilization in barbarism and savagery, Ken Fabian, you've got one on your hands you've made, right now, not tomorrow! Look around you at home and the world over! There is no peace, no world's rise out of a sinkhole of deficit of positive energies and wealth, no gravitation to unity in 'One World' of Earth, and none coming on the horizon until there is breakout, a beginning of birth and expansion to Space and a New Frontier, a 'New World' out there and a rebirth in the other 'New World' in here (two worlds . . . and the other not Mars)!
You want to try to slap down what is become so obvious not in some distant world but in personal experience to so many in the world...?! You're not going to lose . . . you've already lost!!!
Facebook
Twitter
Instagram