Given that after arriving everyone could just die from some weird protein floating around in the air and you might want to look before you spend the entirety of our economic efforts reaching it… erm, look before you leap.
Gemini-Opus-whatever-amalgamated-AI: "doh, you caught me. you're totally right, I shouldn't have destroyed human society!"
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/sep/30/trump-state-...
Don't think there'd be much consideration for the morality of colonizing another planet.
Maybe as an interstellar program where your great grandkids will be the ones that reach the promised land will attract a different clientele tho
America has been lurching from crisis to crisis since Nixon, so it isn’t a surprise that our fiction highlights interpersonal drama. That shouldn’t lead us to conclude that it’s necessary, however. Stories about a team working together against the environment (often portrayed as gods and monsters) are as old as storytelling itself.
This is the part I don't think people appreciate: space sucks. It's horrible. There is not a chance that the rich decide that they'd do that rather than lounge on a yacht. The working class goes first into the mines.
There is some return on that investment but it's necessarily much lower than ROI for direct investment in the needed non-space technologies. I do think there's some argument that we wouldn't spend the R&D at all without the space program, but that's speculative and still doesn't make the ROI worthwhile IMHO.
What makes the R&D worthwhile is space exploration itself. That is of incredible value itself. If you start trying to justify the cost with incidental tech development, you implicitly agree with the framing that space exploration really isn't worthwhile and needs other benefits to justify it - you undermine what you believe in. It's like humanities professors who argue that a history degree has good value in the job market - it does somewhat, but they are accepting the framing that their field and college education has no other value but early career employment and income, instead of life-changing understanding and skills (really embarassing for humanities professors who should understand framing better than anyone!).
Jobs in aerospace are not limited to NASA and SpaceX. They extend to most all defense contractors, as well as a lot of research universities. Every little instrument on every little probe and satellite supports a team of scientists who have designed the thing, and they’re taking the lead in receiving the data, processing it, and producing results.
Even undergrads are getting great experience in research, technical fields, all the gadgetry and computer systems. Transferable skills for lifelong careers in technology.
All of those engineers and scientists and labor-union guys have families to support. So even if space exploration gets us nowhere and we learn nothing and produce nothing, we are right now supporting thousands of jobs and thousands of American families.
And that is worth every penny to me, as a taxpayer.
It was 5-figures of direct NASA employees and over 350K workers in contractors.
How long will it take to reach them?
I mean, it would be a finite problem set, but who is going to pay attention when life span is at 120 years, give or take?
185 years at 0.2c [1][2]. (No deceleration at the other end.)
[1] https://hpf.psu.edu/2026/06/30/gj-3378b/#:~:text=Introductio...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakthrough_Starshot#:~:text=...
It absolutely does not. We don’t know if mammals can reproduce in space because we haven’t done those experiments yet. The closest we’ve come is culturing mouse embryos for four days on the ISS [1].
[1] https://phys.org/news/2023-10-mouse-embryos-grown-space-japa...