In answer to ‘Shouldhumans colonize space?’ i could merely give a link to my answer to ‘Should humans be allowed to live on Mars?’ but perhaps the time is ripe for elaboration on the possibilities afforded by such a move, it’s feasibility and it’s necessity.
Firstly let me say that humans should be allowed to colonize space. There is no logical reason preventing us from doing this, but I can’t think of any reason why we should do it either. Colonizing space seems unecessary and unless you do it for the sake of doing it, and it afford a sense of victory and achievement, and one does it for glory, i see no reason to do it.
However let’s for the moment speculate upon the possibility of colonizing space if it did happen. Say for instance the human race, under command of World President Insertnamehere in 2500 decides to colonize space for the good of… something, and for the grand and important reason of… something. We organize a mass exodus from Earth of thousands of individuals planning on colonizing (let’s say Mars is already a dominion of the Earthish Empire) say… Alpha Centauri or some such place. Families prepare to pack their things for the long jouney ahead, which will take fifty generations to make.
Okay, firstly why would you do this? Crowding on Earth can be solved by extermination of selected individuals as part of a mass extermination process (MEP). Such an MEP could be done humanely by injections of lethal fluids or machine gun fire or somesuch relatively painless method to the more painful death methods. Thus overpopulation to all but superstitious death fearing religious believers is not a reason for a mass exodus from Terra. What else then? If technology in the future makes space travel available to even low income dwellers (hardly likely mind you) then possibly a religious fundamentalist mission similar to the colonizers of North America might be set up, or perhaps a philanthropist mission to exterminate pain suffering alien beasts and cut short their savage existence. Or perhaps a mineral finding expedition is Earth’s resources are not sufficient (though radiation will probably soon be used to operate a alchemy process for the creation of any element from any other element) (reverse radiation must be possible, it’s only logical according to my somewhat weak knowledge of the area- please forgive my lack of data if this is incorrect and not physically possible but a degradation of the periodic table must surely be indicative of the possibility of a reverse effect?).
There are many reasons but none of the make much sense really and i doubt we shall ever colonize space. Mars at best. There simply isn’t a logical reason to do so. Perhaps if this were the Whoniverse, but since that is not the case (no matter how much some nerds may wish it to be) that is not the case.
Thus i doubt we shall conquer space even if it does become fiscally possible.
