this post was submitted on 25 Aug 2023
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Futurology
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Realistically speaking, most space exploration in our future will be done mostly the same as how its done today: through automated telescopes, probes and landers given instructions from Earth (and it will be a very long time before there is any serious effort to send even automated probes to locations beyond the solar system). I could see most space economic activities, such as mining, construction and satellite/station servicing, also being almost completely automated with minimal human presence, except for a few people sitting at computers monitoring it all.
The big changes in the future might be smarter automated machines that can handle doing more on their own, or even for instance machines able to do some rudimentary self-replication in order to establish an industrial presence.
Supporting Humans in Outer Space is very difficult, and years of data from the ISS have shown that lengthy human presence in microgravity is harmful to human health, not to mention that the level of background radiation exposure in deep space is much higher than it is on the surface of the Earth. We would need artificial gravity and radiation shielding to counter these, but this does not solve the other problem, which is that humans need large quantities of breathable air, water and food as the bare minimum requirements of survival in space, and this is before we get to other problems, such as people being enclosed in isolated spaces with only a handful of other people for up to years at a time.
For most of us, Earth will remain our only home for the foreseeable future.