When do you think Humans will start colonizing other planets?

[niDe]

Moreover, what do you think the trigger would be? World war, failing ecosystem? I'd say it'll start sometime in the next 300 years.

[joncha]

Next Tuesday.

[niDe]

[Seeker]

In our own solar system?

Martian colonization could begin in the next 10-20 years if the financing was there. You really need Nuclear Thermal Propulsion to make it feasable in my opinion. The conditions needed are a prolonged period of prosperity around the world marked by a great reduction in the 'spikes' of tradtional capitalist 'boom and bust' cycles.
So 50-100 years or never.

Venus and some of the more slightly earth-like moons of Jupiter and Saturn would require tremendous effort and advanced technologies that only a unified World Government is capable of in my opinion, so 200-300 year or never.

Other star systems? First we'd need to identify a really earthlike planet and learn as much as possible about it. Then we'd have to hope that it was reallly ridiculously close to us in cosmic terms. Then we would have to build a 'Project Orion' type spacecraft capable of 'time dilation' velocities like 85-90% of the SoL. This would be enornmously expensive. We would need to send first an exploration mission, which could possibly tell us that the planet is unsuitable and we've wasted tremendous resources, and if positive an even more immensely expensive colonization mission.

I'm assuming that for interstellar colonization one is limiting oneself to environments that are much more earthlike than mars so the colony can be self-supporting immediately.

Problems: It is extremely unlikely that there are many earth-like planets in close proximity to us. So we'd need crews that live a long long time (cyborgs?) or preserve themselves somehow, which would enable us to expand our range.

Unavoidable problems: As this expansion continued, the planets could only be in communication with their nearest neighbours. There can never be an 'empire' like in MOO because the farthest colonies would be hundreds or thousands of years journey away.

Physcal trade would be extremely rare, but between close neighbours digital exchange of ideas as 'trade' would be possible.

Another issue: Perhaps advanced technological species never find any compelling reason to sit in a space ship for hundreds of years and just spend their time harnessing the energy of their suns and developing their own solar systems, not travelling except in emergencies. Maybe they build Dyson spheres, or unplug from reality and spend their time pretending to be gods in advanced virtual reality playgrounds* whilst their by now artificial bodies sleep on.

For a really advanced species there may be little good reason to travel around the universe, since I'm presuming that by that point they are largely artificial organisms and don't have population problems and get all they energy the need from their suns. They might only move in case of solar system wide disaster, like an impending supernova somewhere in the neighbourhood.

* an interesting thing to note is that given that time is subjective, a species able to construct such a VR playground could (subjectively) exist 'forever' if they set things so that one real second= millions of VR years

So in my opinion colonization of space by an intelligent species will be very limited, no matter how techically advanced we become.

Final note, I have obviously disregarded any sort of 'warp drive' type idea since those proposed, like the Modified Alcubierre Warp Drive, rely on 'unobtanium' (matter with negative mass and negative energy) which IMO probably does not exist and probably can't be created stored or manipulated at all.

[Wycoff]

Assuming no catasrophic collapse of Civilization, I predict:

Mars Colonization: Between 2250-2300 A.D.
Exploitation of the Outer Moons: 2300 A.D. - 2350 A.D.
Colonizing other Solar Systems: At least 10,000 years away, probably much longer.

I wish that I'd be able to live long enough to see these things.

[Wycoff]

Originally posted by Seeker
For a really advanced species there may be little good reason to travel around the universe, since I'm presuming that by that point they are largely artificial organisms and don't have population problems and get all they energy the need from their suns. They might only move in case of solar system wide disaster, like an impending supernova somewhere in the neighbourhood.

____________________________________________
So in my opinion colonization of space by an intelligent species will be very limited, no matter how techically advanced we become.

I'd think that there would be a desire to safeguard the species from destruction (as you noted with your impending supernova example) and to spread the species and its culture across the galaxy. No better way to ensure a species' immortality than to seed it in as many places as possible.

[DaShi]

When we have the means.

[Colon™]

Hopefully within my lifetime. I'm willing to postpone my death for this.

[DaShi]

Don't not hold your breath.

[techumseh]

Severe and accelerating climate change will prevent this from ever happening.

[Geronimo]

Originally posted by techumseh
Severe and accelerating climate change will prevent this from ever happening.

On the contrary severe and accelerating climate change would make it happen far sooner. You ignore the vast amount of slack in the modern economies which is diverted to frivolous activities rather than to expansion projects like this. Like total war severe and accelerating climate change would trigger mobilization of the economic slack to endeavours to deal with the threat.

[Whoha]

it could be a while. Space travel remains quite expensive and will be very dangerous for the forseeable future.

[Hot Mustard]

If this is any indication, no time soon.

[Bill3000]

We better get to Alpha Centauri before 2050, or it's game over

[DRoseDARs]

No, that just means no one will be keeping score anymore.