Even Bas Lastrop acknowledges that human fertility on Mars is unproven.

Your statement about “Space Studies Institute people” is unintentionally funny. I am a senior advisor to SSI.

Pepsi does not pay billions of dollars for a Superbowl ad. It pays millions of dollars. You are vastly overestimating the value of a logo.

Pepsi is a youth-oriented brand. You’re proposing a retirement home. You haven’t even looked at the demographics.

Your unquestioned assumption, without examination, is that if humans are going to settle in space, they must settle on planets. In short, you are what Space Studies Institute people call “planet-centric”; because you have always lived on a planet, you imagine that humans must live on planets.

When I rewatched Babylon 5 last year, I noticed something I hadn’t noticed the first time I watched it, that B5 was indeed an O’Neill free-space colony. Yes, of course, I’d noticed that before, but this time I fully grokked it. I’d just re-read “The High Frontier” (available for free download, by the way), and I’ve realized how much more advantageous it is to stop assuming that planets are necessary for humanity’s future in space. In fact, it is easier for humans to settle in space without planets.

Space exploration does not equal space colonization. I’m all for exploring the planets, but I don’t believe we’ll ever settle on them. There are more resources floating around off-planet than on the *surfaces* of Earth, the Moon and Mars combined. There are many disadvantages to planetary colonization, and few advantages.

If you don’t care about the eventual extinction of humans on Earth, then we don’t need to. If you do, then you need to realize that Earth is a potential single-point failure for humans, be it from giant asteroids, climate change, pandemic, bad television, or whatever. The Earth has a great track record for making macroscopic species extinct, like 99.9 percent even before humans came on the scene. So it really boils down to whether you think it’s worthwhile to preserve humans as a lifeform in the universe…so far it’s the only technological one we know of.

What is the purpose of spending billions to explore space, if humans are never going to settle there?

You didn’t answer that question, because there is no answer.

B5, Star Trek and other science fiction generally show 1G gravity on other planets to avoid the complication of attempting to portray what life would be like without it. In reality, humans would do well to avoid being “multi-planet” to spread throughout the solar system; there may not be any payoff for living in a gravity well if we can create our own real estate with a spinning colony. Operations would be cheaper, the atmosphere would be what we want it to be, and the weather would be predictable.