Individuals buy insurance for unforseen events. What about species insurance, for terrible disasters to our species, globally? Every geology book shows you that's not unreasonable for our species on this one little planet. I suggest no taxpayer dollars be spent on space colonization plans; we have plenty to work out here on Earth. But we should also plan for a long-term future beyond Earth, and that can be done privately. For that reason I'm working with the research group, Icarus Interstellar (http://www.icarusinterstellar.org/), to develop a long-term, interstellar insurance policy for humanity. My first peer-reviewed article on this is now in print at Acta Astronautica, journal of the International Academy of Astronautics. I am quite proud of this article, which argues that humanity's first extraterrestrial migrants should number in the tens of thousands, not the low thousands, or even hundreds, proposed by earlier researchers. How to build starships for 10s of thousands of migrants is up to the engineers and propulsion people The abstract is available below (drafts of it posted previously). Full article access depends on your library, but nearly any library can get nearly anything through interlibrary loan systems. LINK.
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