Yes there is a better way to develop tech without knowingly sending a group of people to their deaths.

We could throw 100s of billions of dollars into it.

But it’s harder to sell to investors than language models

Ways that have no realistic way of happening aren’t better ways.

Obviously we don’t send a group without making it not certain death first. But the person I was responding to said that it would be reliant on Earth, which, yeah, you can’t realistically develop a fully self reliant economy without making a reliant economy first.

I have two important questions.

My first question is: would you be enthusiastic about the concept of a lunar colony?

My second question is: what kinds of things do you think are viable for a colony made within the next 50 years?

Lunar seems more convenient for debugging colony creation than Martian, since the shipping time from Earth will be a whole lot shorter. Projects are a lot harder when trips to the hardware store take months rather than days.

I think Starship makes colonies a whole lot more viable, once they iron out the issues, but I generally don't know enough to answer your second question.

> Projects are a lot harder when trips to the hardware store take months rather than days

How long do you think it takes to plan a trip to the moon?

> I think Starship makes colonies a whole lot more viable

Why?

Presumably there’d be regular missions, so there’d be relatively little additional planning for a given moon trip, similar to how there’s a lot less planning/paperwork that goes into a Falcon 9 launch these days than there was for any rocket before Falcon 9.

Starship’s goal is to drop cost of mass to orbit by a couple of orders of magnitude, if they pull that off, it would drop the cost of supporting a colony by quite a bit.

I’m glad you are into the lunar colony. My biggest issue with the mars colony crowd is their disinterest in a much more practical lunar colony for us to cut our teeth on. Overall I feel like a lot of people are into colonies for aesthetic reasons. If it’s gonna 100-200 years before a colony could be self sustaining, then why are we treating multiplanetaryness as some kind of practical solution to current-day issues that appeared within the last century?