If you could leave Earth and join a space colony permanently (no return,) would you?

[hunter]

42. It's difficult enough to get me onto an airplane...

...I think before I went into outer space I'd want a body adapted to space travel.

I'd be tolerant of vacuum, temperature and radiation extremes, and photosynthetic too so I could soak up calories from sunshine. In short, I'd be tough enough to run around naked on the surface of Mars.

If the human race or our intellectual progeny survive (doubtful) they'll probably look at our visions of human space colonies and chemical rockets the same way we look at Jules Verne's moon travel by giant gun.



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/From_the_Earth_to_the_Moon

If there's any future for intelligent life from Earth it belongs to our machines; machines that will quite a bit more intelligent than we are.

Humans, if we are lucky, will be living as hunter-gathers with built-in internet connections and medical kits. Telepathic communication will be a reality and people will live as long as they want to. Then they will delete themselves or upload edited versions of themselves as artificial intelligences. As artificial intelligences, smaller than grains of sand, they will occupy any sort of body they can create, and they'll be able to travel anywhere they please within the boundaries of known physics.

The universe is probably full of such entities already. It's a giant celebration that never ends, a place some primitives would label "heaven."

Occasionally someone who is still human will want to travel in space, and they will, but only as the ward of their intellectual children. Want to bounce around on the moon in a human body wrapped up in a spacesuit, just like Neil Armstrong? Sure, we can arrange that. But seriously, spearing a salmon for dinner in some Northwestern American stream, or taking your dogs for a walk on a beach, that's a lot of fun too.