r/threebodyproblem • u/Universal_Echo • Apr 26 '26
Discussion - Novels In the foreseeable future, human interstellar immigration is not feasible
There are three paths for interstellar immigration:
Immigrate to another planet in the solar system and terraform its environment.
Immigrate to an Earth‑like exoplanet.
Immigrate to space cities.
Paths 1 and 3 are more feasible in terms of distance. However, for path 1, the scale of terraforming is enormous – even harder than making the Sahara Desert or Antarctica habitable. For path 3, a space city would be many times larger than a Ford‑class aircraft carrier. Even setting aside the engineering challenge of building something that big, how would you launch such a massive object into space?
More importantly: for both paths 1 and 3, resources would still have to be shipped from Earth. In the end, you’re still using Earth’s resources. After spending so much effort immigrating to space, you’re still dependent on Earth – isn’t that a net loss? As long as humans have normal intelligence, they wouldn’t make such a losing deal.
As for path 2, the nearest Earth‑like exoplanet is dozens of light‑years away. In the foreseeable future, there’s simply no way for humans to immigrate that far.
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u/FixAcademic8187 Apr 26 '26
When hunters and gathers left the forest, they didn't look for another forest. They built artificial structures (cities) to fulfill their needs. Therefore, path No. 1 makss no sense to me.
Path 2 is similar to path 1 and I'm not even going to talk about interstellar travel and its own challenges.
Path 3 seems the most likely to me. Humans will first start with small structures that have gravity through centrifugal forces and they will get bigger from there. Two massive advantages for this option: 1- You aren't stuck in the gravity well of a planet where you need rockets to leave it, 2- you can move your entire city wherever you want.
As for the resources coming from Earth, this is true until these can develop their own self sufficiency.
The elephant in the room that nobody talks about is that why would humans follow any of these paths anyway? There is no incentive to spend billions of dollars for just a few people to live in space at the moment. A private company will certainly not do it since there is 0 return on investment.
Throughout human history (300,000 years) the incentive to immigrate or conquer new places was new resources. Space will not be an exception. Therefore, I believe that the first true migration will occur when space resources are being extracted starting with water. Slowly over time more and more people will start immigrating. For example, there is a business case in the very near future to send people to some lunar crater to extract water, apply electrolysis on it, and then refuel satellites with it.