James Davis Nicoll: Sorry to Crush Your Dreams, But We’re Not Colonizing Space Anytime Soon: "Robotic spaceflight has, as we all know, more than delivered on its promise. In fact, one might blame the success of robots for the slowdown in attempts at human space flight...
...(although the human tendency to expire outside of a narrow range of conditions has to be the bigger factor). Clarke’s communications satellites do exist, but it turns out that we do not need orbiting technicians to swap fresh vacuum tubes for burned out ones. There may be military applications for space flight, but really… do we want to go there? Surely we are already capable of destroying ourselves several times over without ever leaving the planet...
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