Reply #58: I don't think that large-scale settlement of Mars or the moon will ever be practical. [View All]

[El Pinko]

It's great as scientific endeavor, but the cost of transporting people and supplies and terraforming will never be lower than the cost of cleaning up the earth and developing recycling technologies here.

This is what we are stuck with, until the sun blows up and burns it all to a cinder. Light-speed travel is a physical impossibility, so migrating to distant planets will never happen either. We need to take good care of this planet or a huge percentage of us will end up dead (permaturely - of course, all of us will end up dead eventually, both as individuals and as a species. It's inevitable.)