Re: [FT universe]

G'day again,
		To follow up on Allan's point that 

>much of modern day exploration, including the deep sea, and space, has
been for scientific reasons, >"because it's there", or even
one-upmanship.
Those rasons don't result in people colonising a planet. They >may
result
in something WORTH finding on other planets, but they aren't reasons to
fund multi-trillion >dollar colonising efforts.
>
>There has to be an economic reason to go to the stars. Running out of
room
here is one of them. Cheap >star travel and access to earth-like planets
get you colonising a far off planet than an asteroid in our own
>neighbourhood.
>
>None of this, even if star travel was discovered tomorrow, will happen
within 100 years, though.

	My husband concurs with you that wealth is the greatest
motivating force,
but he'd like to point out that because of it interstellar travel and
colonisation is far more likely. For instance if you look at the
costings
of just one of the privately funded dutch explorations (during the age
of
sail), which went looking for tradeable items (for instance the spices
from
Indonesia etc), you'll find that it comes out at an amount greater than
what NASA spent on the Voyager missions. Basically the returns from such
missions of exploration and colonisation made the initial outlay look
piddling. And its not just all the direct returns you get which make
space
exploration and colonisation attractive its the incidentals. For
instance
my 87 year old grandmother was berating me on our last visit that I had
my
head in the clouds and what had space ever done for her - this as she
was
cooking dinner in her non-stick fry pan.

	Lastly, as to running out of space and resources. We're running
pretty
short of a few essentials already. For instance, xenophobic arguments
aside,	Australian immigration should be slowed or even halted. Not
because
of any social or racial issues, but because the population has outgrown
(or
is just about to outgrow) the environment's longterm ability to provide
it
with water. 

	Mind you there is also one other very good reason to get off the
planet
(and I am being a tad silly here) - its the fact that Sol won't last
forever :)

Have fun,

Beth (and Derek)