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Message: <blockquote data-quote="TwinBahamut" data-source="post: 5277259" data-attributes="member: 32536">All told, there are just two things we need to done in order to put people anywhere in the solar system. First, we need a better way to put people and equipment into space than the traditional space shuttle system. Second, we need to put enough people and equipment into space in order to build a large permanent habitat in space capable of housing a few thousand people, processing materials, and manufacturing goods on its own. Once we have that, the solar system would be our playground.With a single working orbital colony, strip-mining the moon for raw materials is ridiculously efficient compared to hauling stuff up from the Earth, so it becomes easy to build bigger and better orbital colonies. And once you have permanent space habitats, taking the long, energy efficient route to other planets in the solar system is a lot more feasible (certainly more feasible than launching a ship built on Earth directly to Mars), because even if it takes years to get anywhere you could still do so comfortably (and bring the whole family along for the ride). The first colonization of Mars probably won't be a couple dozen astronauts riding a shuttle launched from Earth's surface, it will probably be when a few large-scale permanent space colonies each filled with millions of people arrive into orbit around the planet.Anyways, according to the people who first really looked into these possibilities, we could have had that critical, first permanent orbital colony by the mid nineties or so. So the question is not so much "How far are they away?" but rather "For what reasons have we not done so already?"As for travel to worlds outside of the solar system... Honestly, I don't have a clue. I don't think identification of habitable Earth-like planets is at all necessary, since man-made structures placed near large gas-giants or in stable orbits of stars themselves would be perfectly suitable for human habitation. Nor do I think it would be strictly necessary to bring significant sub-light speeds into the equation, since people may very well be willing to set out on journeys that would not be completed in their own lifetimes. It probably won't happen until the solar system as whole becomes crowded, though, which may take centuries or even millenia from the time the colonization of the solar system begins.</blockquote>

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