🚀 go-pugleaf

If they don't find water on the moon, I have a hard time believing that
there will ever be large colonies there.  Maybe small stations devoted
to running astronomical instrumentation.  

Mars will be the only real place for a large colony, but then again,
if there isn't anything there that's very interesting (like life or
fossils) I can't see large colonies being placed up there.  

Seems like the future will see expanding development of robotic systems
that will be used to explore every planet and moon, at a vastly 
reduced cost over sending humans.  

Maybe in the next 100-200 years biology will advance to the point
where Venus could be altered with microbes.  Change the atmosphere
so SOMETHING could live there.  It would be interesting to see what
could live there if the temperature was reduced.

I think science fiction has given people a false sense of the possible.
The space travel fiction of over 100 years ago neglected things like
radio and computer electronics, and required a travelling human.
TEchnology has superseded the human, and the information can be 
returned much more efficiently. 

The urge to colonize the universe seems to come from an urge for 
terretorial conquest that has been with us for a long time.  It is
interesting how old themes are constantly repeated in the present.
It's too bad we can't interest some of our race (Serbians, Saddam, etc.) 
in coveting lunar instead of earthly real estate.  

-rabjab