Moved from Speculation thread, still off topic but interesting.
I'm of the opinion that we need to learn how to terraform our own planet before we waste the resources on going to others. Not to mention the fact we need to overcome the hurdle of the cost of putting mass into space. What ever happened with that elevator Idea?
AFAIK, the elevator was dependent on nanotube development. Though, if you have a small mining operation in space, you could use the resources that you are mining to expand the mining operation indefinitely--this may be a good application of drones and 3-d printers--so becomes a question of getting enough resources into space for the first operation; from there you can keep expanding.
OT, so I'll say those drones will use monero to transact their energy cost from one drone to another <---square'd hole, round peg.
I think the nano tube tech is needed so that the cable is strong enough to withstand It's own weight and the forces that will act on it from weather and such. It should be available in a cost effective manner relativity soon. But I've never seen a untethered Idea floated. An platform from orbit to just above the tropopause would seem like a decent Idea to effectively control many of the variables the troposphere will throw at it. I wonder what the cheapest method to get to the stratosphere would be? After a little googling it looks like there are those proposing a tower.
I think XMR could be used to fund this.
I'm of the opinion that we need to learn how to terraform our own planet before we waste the resources on going to others. Not to mention the fact we need to overcome the hurdle of the cost of putting mass into space. What ever happened with that elevator Idea?
Bad idea.
There are any number of risks involved in a species having only a single planet. And although having 2 planets in the same solar system so close to each other is only marginally better, it is very important.
It is extremely hard to fully control the Earth's environment; because the law of diminishing returns pretty much exists in everything. I figure we could potentially be able to travel beyond the solar system to other star systems (at least with robots) before we can fully control the Earth. It's just too difficult.
First off It would be so far in the future that we could create a self sustaining planet even in our own system that this bolded argument is more than likely moot. Second if we don't have the tech to control our own planets climate there is no way we can ever hope to change another planet enough that we could live there without life support, which is completely unfeasible in another solar system. So even if we can find a goldilocks planet we will still need the tech to terraform it and that starts here.
Don't get me wrong, I love exploration and space travel more than most but lets not use fallacies to push an agenda at the cost of a far more important goal.
