There was a time when space was not mostly empty though. That’s what the cosmic background radiation shows us.
And everything was being bombarded with comets, asteroids, gamma ray bursts, and all the other horrors of our current universe but right next door. Too much chaos for any sustainability.
True, but you are mixing up a little bit of the timeline of the universe.
The CMB is from a time about 300,000 years after the “big bang” where the entire universe was basically a giant red star. It was the first time that any light could shine, because before that, the entire universe was so dense that literally no light could move. There were no comets or asteroids because there was literally no way for anything solid to form. https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Space_Science/Herschel/Cosmic_Microwave_Background_CMB_radiation
The time of the comets and asteroids were billions of years later. Much later, after the galaxies, and then our solar system developed. This was about 10 billion years after the time that the CMB was being emitted. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_Heavy_Bombardment
I’ve had a fantasy since I was young that I would live to see some start to building colonies on the moon or Mars. The older I get and realize how vast the distances are between the earth, the moon, Mars and anything else, I’ve realized that I don’t think we’ll ever really leave earth in anything more than to go into orbit around earth. People are very tied to the environment that we formed in and taking that with us to another planet will be prohibitively expensive and refreshing supplies to support that can largely only be done on earth.
Now I believe people won’t make any permanent settlement outside of earth in my lifetime or ever.
Ever is a very long time. We have the technology today to build a colony on the Moon and on Mars.
When something is a science problem (i.e. - warp drive) we might never achieve it, because it might not even be possible.
When something is an engineering problem (i.e. - just bigger rockets) we ALWAYS eventually get there. It just takes a small group of people with the right motivation to get it done.
If humanity survives into the future without regressing technologically, I think it’s very likely that humanity will expand into space. Yes, the earth is very habitable, but space is abundant in resources if we can get to them, as well as opening up a new world of manufacturing due to no space or gravity limitations. Possibly will be necessary for future research and science as well, as ever more demanding experiments will be desired.
Once space infrastructure gets really going, I think space will be a very natural environment to expand into. And that will also imply at least semi-permanent habitats.
Is this the origin meme? Or does it go back even further
Further. It originally was crudely drawn:
Haha wow. It looks like they didn’t know how far it would come
