this post was submitted on 01 Jan 2026
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Comic Strips
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Flying cars was a scifi delusion that didn't consider all the problems that come with it. What would be a more rational "this was predicted and never came about" would be social constructs like safety nets and betterment of society for all, as well as improving our management and use of the Earth. That should make us mad, not that we don't have flying cars buzzing (and falling) in the sky.
It just hit me that we did for flying what we should have done for ground. Make it almost all mass transit.
Yeah, screw flying cars and parts falling off them due to disrepair.
The real sci-fi future is trains. Numerous and fast.
Same with living in space. Especially on space boats.
Maybe. We never got far enough to really test the waters that much. I think that it's more possible than flying cars or living on Mars, but it would take huge effort, and my opinion is the window of opportunity is all but shut now. But why should we? If for no other reason than because of the "eggs in one basket" metaphor. Even past climate change and impacts, this Sun won't last forever, and if we don't find ways to move on, all life that we know of is gone.
Maybe that doesn't matter in the end, after all the universe also ends some way too. I think even if life is everywhere, it's all unique, and so are we, good and bad. But we obviously don't treasure what we have much, and maybe it's better we don't spread the same bad we do to Earth and ourselves elsewhere. It's possible we simply advanced before we were mature enough to understand what we could stand to lose.
No. It's not.
It'd be easier to colonize the bottom of the ocean, or under kilometers of ice, or in an active lava pit. Orders of magnitude easier. As longs as humans are still "flesh and blood" humans, that's the scale of impracticality we're talking about.
As much as I love Start Trek and such, it paints a widly inaccurate picture of the sheer difficulty of human space habitation, and spawned the idea that there's an escape from the โall eggs in one basketโ thing. There is not. Until we're bio-engineered uploads with space elevators or whatever (and the habitation issues we have now are basically irrelevant), Earth is all we got to live on en masse.
Now, can nations come together and keep a few dedicated scientists alive in space for awhile? For a science mission? Absolutely. And they should.
But colonies that can sustain themselves are a whole different animal.
Your list of other places to colonize are easier than a difference of one atmosphere and controllable environment? That's funny. I never implied it would be easy, I said the opposite, and getting into space is a big part of that. And there are dangers to figure out. But a hull leak in space is far safer than even a few hundred meters under water.
Yes. Dramatically.
You can ship stuff to any place on Earth trivially. Need a new building for a colony? Float it over, drop it in the ocean. Food? Fuel? Medicine? Send it. You get a free mass to pull/dump heat, oxygen is never far away. You have rock and water to process. You have free radiation shielding! You have tons of mass budged to just store supplies and spare parts you might need.
It's like a paradise, even in hellish Earth conditions.
But space?
You have nothing.
Sending anything to LEO is orders of magnitude more expensive than, say, sinking it into Hawaii's volcano. Or drilling it a mile into ice. Forget places that are light seconds (or light hours) away.
Heat? Has to be dumped with huge radiators, limiting how much you can produce. Air? Water? Fuel? Parts? You have what's with you, and that's it. There's no mass budget for heavy manufacturing equipment, no easy supply chain for any of the equipment keeping you alive.
As a human, assuming zero G is engineered away, you just have to deal with tons of radiation, and pay a huge price for a shielded core to sleep/hide in. Plants you bring along get irradiated too, though a closed loop food/waste cycle is the easy part. There's no mass to push against, no place for heat to float away if there's suddenly a fire or power outage, and you have X amount of fuel before your craft is stuck.
If it's anything like the Saturn V, the mass:fuel ratio of your craft is something like a full aluminum coke can. Paper-thin metal is all that keeps your 1 atmosphere and explosive fuel in, whereas anywhere on the ground, you can get orders of magnitude more mass and dump it anywhere. Imagine having to build a car or a hospital or whatever out of gold leaf instead of steel and concrete; that's the kind of engineering challenge you're dealing with.
...To reiterate, I think Star Trek like shows where people can just walk around the hull, or even (relatively) short term mission like Apollo 11 or the ISS, give people a bad idea what actual colonization in space would involve. There is no Enterprise, there's not even a Rocinante no matter how advanced civilization gets: transcendent civilizations would still have ships that are basically all engine, and space stations that are just temporary until humans don't really resemble humans anymore: https://www.orionsarm.com/eg-topic/45bbe204d461e
And I don't want to sound like I'm against space missions. Space telescopes? Moon bases? Awesome! Fund it. They're great ideas.
But forget sustainable unaugmented human habitation. Forget ever being able to live offworld without massive support from Earth. Physics simply do not allow it, and we won't even resemble humans anymore by the time its practical.
You're including a great list of things we have or do have to look into to solve before space is trivial. You're omitting a lot of the problems of underwater, or even above water colonies. I do agree that colonization of space comes only if we can make it self-sufficient, as getting all the resources from a gravity well makes it ridiculously costly and limited. I disagree on how any of the problems have no solutions though, as they've been discussed even before I was born, and I'm old. ๐ซค
Will humans change by necessity and by exposure? Of course they will. The Expanse did a good job of suggesting early changes to those living in low gravity conditions (which is probably the biggest thing to solve, not radiation or material sources). And after even longer they will change even more, making the different places become subsets of the species as we diverge.
Thanks for the link, I could not remember where that site was from so long ago, but it's a great collection of lore and speculative ideas.
We just disagree on what can be done. I can't imagine the scifi visions of underwater places that ignore how a small crack leads to instant crushing, or the constant corrosion that has to be fought against. On the Moon and Mars we've got the dust that is still a questionable thing on how to handle (electrostatic charges were the last I saw that seemed like they may help some). If you don't have to rely on Earth for most supplies and you find ways to counter radiation (a few meters of slag works, not practical for a ship due to the mass, but a station isn't a problem). Rotation may solve a lot of the problems with zero G, but we need to do more research on site before we can just accept it's unsolvable.
It may not matter and we may not be around that long for it to be a factor anyway, but assuming we are, we have to move on from the Earth, as the window of habitability is not that long. Huge for us at human scales, but cosmically we're way past the halfway point.
With unlimited ressources floating around... maybe with AGI assisted asteroid mining in 200 years (at the current trajectory with capitalism and political drama).