Re: [OT] Bureau of Relocation

Snippage.

>Second, there's resistance, as with moving a physical object.
Space Travel
>is expensive.

NO, IT IS NOT.

Now that I have your attention....
You are making an assumption here.  Space travel _is_
expensive....at the moment.  But we are not talking about the
moment, we are talking about the future, and I think we can take
it as a given (in the canon background) that shipment to orbit
is going to become about as cheap as air travel is now.

What are the technical details of making it cheap?  How would I
know?  But the game involves hyperspace jumps, and you don't
have a problem swallowing that, so why should you strain at
swallowing relatively inexpensive ground-to-orbit and
interplanetary travel?

Now, I'm prepared to grant that star travel isn't something that
just anyone can do on a whim, particularly not at first.  But
I'm suggesting that when it gets to the point where travel time
is on the order of a month or so, then colonization is feasible.
That appears to have been the case, historically.

>Which is why most (not all, but MOST) successful colony efforts
are going to
>combine both Push AND Pull.

Of course.  Not only to you need a reason to leave, you need a
place to go to.  Otherwise you'd move to New Zealand, instead of
another planet.  I don't disagree with most of your analysis.
But I think you underestimate the lure of freedom.  If you
offered me a square kilometer of farmland and no federal or
state regulations or taxes to worry about, I'd sign up so fast
the paper would smoke.	Okay, maybe it would cost $40K per
person (I'm figuring that based on roughly 30 airline flights="a
month's travel"), I could sell the house and have money left
over to buy starter equipment, so let's go!  Or the army could
offer it as a benefit--stay in for 20 and you can be discharged
on New Eden, with your own land.