Humans Will Never Live on Another Planet, Nobel Laureate Says.

Joe Strout wrote:

> And even that ignores the fact that expansion to other stars will be
> more a gradual diffusion than some sort of big colony mission. Our Oort
> cloud extends nearly 2 LY's out. So does the next one over, most likely.

And in fact I need to update my thinking on this a bit now that we're
finding interstellar comets swooping by, probably at a rate of several
per year.

There will come a time when our solar system, even as vast as it is,
starts to feel a little crowded -- when every major chunk of rock and
ice has been claimed by somebody, with much of it well on the way to
being turned into clusters of space colonies. (And given exponential
growth, this time will probably come in centuries, not millenia.)

At that point, when an interstellar visitor comes by with a good mix of
minerals & volatiles, *somebody* is going to decide to match orbits with
it and set up shop. And off they go, right on out of the solar system.
Presumably they would have calculated the orbit very carefully and
found that it eventually intersects another star system some number of
centuries later, and when it does, some or all of their descendants will
change orbit again, having hit the motherload of a whole unclaimed star
system.

New physics? Pfft! Nothing of the kind is needed, and eventual
expansion to the stars looks inevitable to me.