That seems kind of vague. "A device inside the moon's core to increase gravity," what is that? It kind of seems like you are talking about magic (A.K.A. technology so advanced that 'magic' is as good a term as any for it). You might as well say, "yeah, to terraform the moon, all we need is a device that terraforms."

my dear if no one imagines it it ain't gonna manifest, its the number ONE rule of the universe, if some one did not dream about how a laptop would look like it won't happen and if people like me don't dream about how to organize a proper Mars colony it ain't gonna happen, every thing you see even you coffee table was just a thought in some ones' mind

and yes you NEED gravity to help keep the atmosphere thick enough, mag shield won't do the job alone.

I thought you meant terraforming by "starting Earth 2", sorry.

I'm sorry. Who is this Mrs. Hegens who happens to be a he?

I don't know who this (presumably transvestite) Mrs Hegens is, but Faster than light travel is impossible, fast as light travel is also impossible. Even the LHC which propels things as fast as humanity has ever moved things is only round 99.999% of the speed of light. We can theretically get to (for practical purposes) to the speed of light, but over it is impossible according to Einstein and I have yet to see him be proven wrong on that topic. Although I'm not saying it's impossible (see Heisenbergs uncertainty principle.)


Gravity+Fusion reactor isn't terraforming was the point I was trying to make

Way to miss the point, the average Joe dreamt about space travel 50 years ago, you said they also dreamt of laptops and they are real now.

I was saying average Joe didn't give two [censored] about computers 50 years ago, maybe scientists thought we'd have computers capable of communication but no-one dreamt of laptops let alone how expensive they would be. Laptops and heart surgery were things that scientists thought about and developed, kids didn't dream about it it wasn't in the public psyche like space travel was.

My coffee table was designed, but little kids in the 50's didn't one day hope to be the man who designed it, the original point (i think) was that space travel has always been romanticised and the gap between science and science fiction thin enough at times that people have been speculating on it for years, computers and heart surgery have had a more logical path and has seemed mundane due to the nect step in computing being more or less planned out. We don't have the first clue about space colonisation on a serious level so our imaginations are more free to think about what it would be like. In 60's the reality of computers was so boring nobody cared, hence it being different.

I think he was referring to the fact that none of the things you listed had even been concieved yet, so it's impossible for people to be thinking about how they are gonna make their laptops and cellphones cheaper and smaller when neither existed.

something that affects mass (since we know it can me affected artificially now) think mass effect universe only without Ezoo XD, just drill and place it (of course the tech is still WAYYYYYYYYYY off for this) actually the terraforming part is the easiest since we are doing it to earth now via global warming, with better tech it would just be done faster

Mrs Hegens is a handsome young man who said "We won't need warp drive to go FTL."

oh he is the guy that discovered the God particle which is responsible for the giving all matter the "mass" property, now in a few years thanks to him we will be able to figure out what the hell dark matter is AND like int eh mass effect game manipulate mass as we see fit.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VowfYuhx1-o

I think you mean the Higgs boson, named after Peter Higgs...

Also, all the things you mentioned are not going to happen in a "few years".

Planets are too expensive too colonize (gravity well) and moons usually too barren, although some of Jupiters moons seem suitable.
Far more viable is living in space itself.
There are an almost infinite supply of suitable large rocks that we can hollow out and spin up so that the centrifugal force simulates gravity.

It is also far cheaper to get your resources from various types of asteroids than it is to get it from the surface of a planet.
I imagine a vast ring around the sun of city-sized spaceborn habitats connected via an intricate trading and resource gathering network.
In the long run this is orders of magnitude cheaper to achieve than even a simple domed city on a planet, let alone a terraforming effort.
You can also house far, far more humans this way.

in the long run terra forming is cheaper as at a certain point it stops costing money, unlike a space station

Higgs, and no, manipulating mass instantaneously destroys things, unless we can figure out how to put highs bosons back onto an object, which is so far to the future we could have terrafirmed mars and been done with it

Im not talking about space stations but self-contained habitats kilometers in diameter.
They cost far less as a space station as there is less maintenance.
You can easily make a radiation and micrometeor impact shield around your hollowed out rock for instance, simply by coating it in a metre or two of mud.

Planets will always be more expensive, hard-sf writers did the math decades ago.
It is far more expensive to get resources from your planet than it is to get them from small rocks floating around in space, if you live in space yourself.
They exist in purer forms and are more easily extracted.
A planet also has nasty side-effects such as weather and can never be as easily evactuated when it eventually breaks down and becomes uninhabitable, as all things eventually do.
You can house a few billion people on a planet, a few trillion in the asteroid belt alone, figures on how many can live in the Kuiper belts and Oort clouds are staggering.

Planets never stop costing money for a spacefaring civilisation if they wish to remain spacefaring.
Apart from utilising handy physics tricks such as building a space elevator or bolas, you have a very expensive gravity well to deal with for every export and import.

Lastly, planets are unpredicable.
Not only are there inconvenient things like weather and a large ecology that is impossible to keep under tight control (mosquitos, diseases), there are also dowright nasty things such as earthquakes and volcanoes.

A nice hollowed out rock the size of New York, spun up to about .95 of Earth gravity compared to Mars?
I know where I would want to live.

I,all take the planet. What you described is basically a man made planet anyway and I don,t se any point of humanity being space faring till we discover aliens. Planets can be entirely self sufficient, and unless you some of those habitats to be entirely farmland I don't see a way of making them self sufficient. Planets are also harder to sabotage, and easier for groups who dislike each other to spread out rather than fight.

Oh yes, absolutely, on the farms.
There is a lot of variety in the floaty rocks out there, some are made of mainly ice, some are made of mainly metal, some are rocks.
Its relatively easy to start a hydroponics plant on an iceteroid.
I also image great solar collectors built out of metallic asteroids, unmanned mining vessels and the like.

it sounds viable to use hydroponics, but I would feel skighlty paranoid if my food supply was so reliant on security of a dome

An industrialised asteroid can easily be protected by hollowing it out and coating the outer layer in a self-sealing polymer.
If needed one can apply layers of mud or water to the outer shell for further protection.
A micrometeor hits, is absorbed by the outer layer and the polymer expands to mend any gap.

Of course, thats for minor natural events like radiation and micometeors. For larger projectiles there are other possibilities such as changing its course by grazing it with a laser.
Nothing will stop a deliberate attempt to blow stuff up, but thats true for planets as well as space.

Thanks to solar panels, we should be able to get a huge amount of energy from our solar system.

When that's done, building a sealed house with its own ecosystem and gardens (for air) can be done, keeping it warm and lighted up thanks to the huge amount of energy from the solar panels.

Perhaps even some sort of gas could be sprayed into mars, making the outer layer as protective as the earths is. The whole planet might be made habitable, eventually.

excluding attacks from within I think planets are safer from space strikes from other civilizations than a space installation, planets as a whole can be rigged up with a missile grid, and possibly be rnendered near imoenatrable with future technology. With enough engine power a planet might even be rendered mobile

That sounds like a huge catastrophe, lol.

That's one of my future visions of the earth, hehe. Moving about in space just before our sun is about to die out, keeping it warm enough from within thanks to the huge amount of energy and making it move through the entire universe on its own

It might be easier to build a death-star though.

I can't believe I never thought of driving a planet.

As long as we're on this sci-fi/fantasy kick, how about we get some Dyson spheres going too?

How about we create our own stars?

This was a good Invader Zim episode.