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Originally Posted by Zephyr
Well, here's the thing--which would be easier to accomplish, Faster than Light (FTL) travel, or terraforming? I would say that FTL travel is easier to accomplish, because the Moon does not have enough mass to have an atmosphere. It simply does not have the gravity required to hold in gases. Same thing with Mars--it doesn't have a liquid core, so there is no magnetic field. The atmosphere has long since been blown away by solar wind and the planet is mercilessly bombarded by solar radiation.
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Actually the prime bets are Venus or one of the moons on Jupiter or Saturn, which do have atmosheres.
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Terraforming would only be theoretically possible on Venus, which is probably too close to the sun to be habitable in any case.
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Actually, that is not that great of a concern. The main concern is it's extremely slow rotation, thus making it's days and nights drastically different (or they would be after the terraforming).
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So, FTL travel and extrasolar colonization would be our best option--and that probably won't happen until humans unify under one political banner. The nation-state system will have to collapse before we are able to engineer any sort of extrasolar colony. The reason? One nation alone will not be able to amass the resources required for a project on that scale. Gaining the ability to travel faster than light--and there are numerous theories on how this could be done--is not going to be easy, and one nation--even the giant United States--is not going to be able to figure it out alone.
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Even in scientific law this is not possible (sure there are theories on how it might be possible, but that is a far cry for being based in reality), we can't even get a single electron to go that fast. Really the only option would be to learn to control the governing ether of the quantum world (which we would first have to discover before we can control) and they do tunneling.