The main resource needed for life is light (which is abundant throughout the solar system), not land or gravity, so the sparseness of planets isn’t actually a big deal.
It’s also worth remembering the Moon; it’s slightly harder than Mars and even smaller; but the Moon will play an important role in the Earth-Moon system, similar to what the Americas have been to the Old World in the past 400 years.
Interstellar travel is a field where we currently don’t have good proof of capabilities yet, but if we can figure out how to safely travel at significant fractions of c, it shouldn’t take anything more than a few decades to reach the nearest stars, quite possibly even less time than that; and even if we end up failing to expand beyond the Solar System, I’d say that’s more than enough to justify calling the events coming in the next few decades a revolution on par with the cambrian explosion and the development of life.
Thanks for the thoughts.
The main resource needed for life is light (which is abundant throughout the solar system), not land or gravity, so the sparseness of planets isn’t actually a big deal.
It’s also worth remembering the Moon; it’s slightly harder than Mars and even smaller; but the Moon will play an important role in the Earth-Moon system, similar to what the Americas have been to the Old World in the past 400 years.
Interstellar travel is a field where we currently don’t have good proof of capabilities yet, but if we can figure out how to safely travel at significant fractions of c, it shouldn’t take anything more than a few decades to reach the nearest stars, quite possibly even less time than that; and even if we end up failing to expand beyond the Solar System, I’d say that’s more than enough to justify calling the events coming in the next few decades a revolution on par with the cambrian explosion and the development of life.