Colonisation of
space does indeed seem to be a
natural consequence of our
societies tendency to have a positive growth rate, i.e. for most of the
world,
births exceed
deaths.
The
planets in our the
solar system are not really suitable for habitation, and would either require vast buildings, or perhaps
terraforming to house a growing
population.
Of course our
technology will need to drasticaly improve to meet the challenges that this will bring; however certain areas of our technology develop
exponentially. It may well be that space based and assiociated technology could undergo the same
revolution that
computing has, if so within a 20 or 30 year time period, the solar system
could open up to delevopment.
On a cautionary note, the very reason for colonisation, our growth rate could still be our undoing. If we don't find a way to limit our
population and live within the
restrictions imposed by the resources available, we will
always run out of space. Even the 1-2% population growth rate of a lot of the world gives an exponential curve, eventually this would lead to a need to colonise the
stars, and at an ever quickening rate. This 'wave' of expansion would eventually have to move at the
speed of light to keep up; and behind the wave would be star systems, full to bursting and running out of resources....
I think we should expand, not to make our society larger, but to be more
flexible and
resilent; to ensure the survival of the
species over
geological timescales. Right now the
cosmological environment we live in, could wipe out the human
species. Our technology now is
brittle with respect to the forces that could act upon it, such as
asteroid impacts,
supernova explosions, the passage of the sun though a dust cloud to name a few.
Getting into space will take a lot of thinking, staying there will
really take thinking and planning.