Stross has rarely-found pragmatism and realism in personally-held and publicly-shared opinions about space colonization for a popular science fiction author. Wh

Stross has rarely-found pragmatism and realism in personally-held and publicly-shared opinions about space colonization for a popular science fiction author. While professionally he writes about a human future where we travel the stars, the TL;DR is personally, he holds that with our current understanding of physics, our meat sack bodies will never colonize space. Explore yes, but mass-exodus-colonization or even plant-seed-colonization-for-independent-colony is a pipe dream; he doesn't see the proof that we are capable of even colonizing the solar system, but leaves an open door to invite in that proof. http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/08/space-cadets.html http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/08/space-ca... http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2007/06/the_high_frontier_redux.html http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2007/06/the_high... So a Kessler Cascade definitely sucks, but it isn't an "OMG, humanity loses its 'birthright to the stars'!" catastrophe because we can't GET to the stars for the foreseeable future, barring a Copernican-grade revolution in physics and accompanying engineering that opens a hitherto-unknown means of multiple magnitudes FTL transportation of the peta- to tetra-tons of mass associated with an en masse out-migration to the stars scenario. This has interesting implications (I happen to strongly agree with his analysis) for how we set and carry out future policy, if you want to figure out means of nudging our species' survival odds upwards over the long haul (Long Now Foundation, millennia to millions of years scale).