“Even if we could build a vessel that could travel at 0.1% of the speed of light, we can colonize this entire solar system at will.”
How so? The place still has to be livable...
Space stations and stuff can be colonies of a sort.
Give Obama a few more terms and you will beg for a patch of land on Pluto.
Long after the Earth has been turned into a burnt over cinder or altogether vaporized by the expanding Sun in its giat phase of growth, billions of humans can be thriving in their asteroidal habitats in the outer Solar System. There is more water readily available among just a few asteroids and Dwarf planets in the outer system than there is on the entire earth. Then there is far more water in the Kuiper Belt. Living inside some of the larger asteroids could feel little different than standing outdoors in a sunny day on the Earth.Only a few thousand feet of air above the head can give the impression of a blue sky. Such internal galleries can yield enough arable acreage to inside Ceres to equal the Earths arable land surfaces. Humanity’s future is even more likely to be found in habitats among the asteroids than those to be found upon the planets and planetary sized moons. The energy costs for transportation between the inner Solar System and the Outer solar System can be no more and sometimes less than the transportation costs from the surface of the Earth to the Cis-Lunar orbit or the surface of the Moon/Luna.
The outer Solar System can not only be made livable, it is likely to be Humanity’s only hope for long-term survivaland a very comfortable and thriving survival.
Genesis bomb? ;-D