[pretendscholar]

Distributing human populations to ensure survival. With current tech the lunar colony couldn't be self-sustaining but the ideal is that humans would be able to propagate and sustain themselves outside of Earth so that a single event couldn't end human civilization. Also creating a jobs program that will produce the technology necessary for a lunar colony will improve materials science, medical understanding, logistics.

[XorNot]

I don't think distributing within the solar system is going to do much for us. What takes out the Earth will probably take out everything else - we'll be backstopped on Earth for centuries after we have spaceborne civilization.

I think opening up a new frontier however, is valuable - in fact specifically, the transition which would be good would be to move heavy industry out of the biosphere entirely. You can imagine a nearer future where a place like Earth is treated as the paradise it is, and the idea of polluting it when we have all the rest of the uninhabitable space of the solar system to do that in is thought of as ludicrous.

And this isn't really unreasonable - beyond a certain point, the resource and energy availability of space is far greater then the places we can reach despite the advantages of the biosphere - whether we do it by robots or with manned exploration.

There's a zeitgeist change that I think would accompany having enough people working frequently in space: where its a couple of degrees of separation from someone who's looked at the pale blue dot and gone "you have no idea how valuable this is" (I do think we should have a program which sponsors any world leader who wants to on a trip around the moon: send the people making the big decisions out past the dark side, where the thing bubble of air, steel and alloy is the only thing keeping them alive - might not always work but at least then we can know they've had the opportunity for that perspective).

[ivan_gammel]

Self-sustaining human colonies in space or on other celestial bodies are very distant dream, probably it will take several centuries or millennia to happen. The main reason is human body: we haven’t figured out reproduction in low gravity yet. Unless some fascist state will do it, we will never experiment with it until full confidence in safety for the mother and the child.

[dotnet00]

It's a very distant dream that will always remain distant if we don't work on it. We have a lot of things to test before we get to testing the gravitational requirements of human reproduction. As it stands, we don't even know our basic gravitational needs. All we know is that 0g is too low. It's entirely possible that it turns out we can function relatively fine at something low but non-zero, like 0.1g.

[gamacodre]

I expect we'll experiment with that as soon as we get a man and a woman imperfectly supervised in a low-gravity environment for 9+ months.

[philwelch]

It’s easier than you think to get 1g of gravity in space.

[JKCalhoun]

Instead, launch sealed, frozen embryos into orbits of various bodies in our Solar System — bury a few on the Moon.

[hosh]

We could also learn to live within the means of our ecology.

[pretendscholar]

That wouldn't prevent one off extinction type events like asteroids. We can improve our understanding of ecology by trying to design such systems for lunar colony artificial biospheres.

I do agree that we should better manage our impact on the only system that we know works.

[sho_hn]

This sounds like the harder problem.

[mr_toad]

> We could also learn to live within the means of our ecology.

That would be easier if we could move polluting industries off Earth.