1. Engineering planets
Searching for earth-like planets to colonise is a very time-consuming task, and we don't even know if we'll be able to find anything within a remote travelling distance before our own planet gets over-populated, and human kind will have to change our concept of moral and ethics, or die.
That's why we need to look for ways to apply our technology to change currently inhabitable planets into habitable planets. One of the most common examples of this, is the idea of nuking Mars to smelt the polar ice caps, and with the water we will hopefully be able to create an atmosphere, in which plants can grow, and eventually the planet becomes self-sustainable. Other similar ideas could be cooling down over-heated planets like Venus, and transporting ice from Neptune to be smelted into liquids on Venus. Water isn't a necessity for life, but liquids are. (Or are they?) Or burrowing deep into the ice on Neptune to escape the icy winds, and slowly engineer methods to capture larger amounts of solar light to sustain life below the ice.
2. Nanobots
Whilst this is an easy applicable method for colonizing our own solar system, that's like Columbus reaching the Caribbean and saying: "Hey guys, there's a bunch of nice little islands here. Lets settle down, make this our colony, and tell people we found all there is. We don't need to explore for more land now." We want to colonize the galaxy, perhaps even create the basics for life on a couple of planets in far off solar systems to be able to study how life evolves, and learn more about ourselves in the process.
To colonize the galaxy we need vessels and travellers who can travel for thousands upon thousands of years at most. Human astronauts just wont cut it then. What we need is nanobots, they go from planet to planet, and get instruction from the earth on how to engineer that planet for human life. And they set up everything we need to travel there ourselves. Nanobots are much lighter then conventional spacecrafts, and can be slingshot from magnetic fields surrounding planets to reach speeds up to 10-20% of the Speed of Light (SoL). They are a key ingredient to colonize space.
3. Human Light Travel
Still there's the issue of how to finally get to the planet. We've had our nanobots engineer a planet 10 lightyears away into the perfect copy of the earth. They have even created arcologies, huge megacities where a self-sustaining society can live and prosper whilst studying life evolving on the planet. But we still lack the society, still lack the humans. This is where laser technology and computer technology come into the picture.
When breaking a human being up into small enough parts, what it becomes is basically information. A bunch of electrical and chemical connections building up atoms, molecules, cells, body parts. Every little thing that is you, could theoretically be encoded into a computer, into bits and bytes. Even those things that make you into the individual person you are. Everything that are you is confined in your body, that's the whole concept of you being you. So, by having a 3-dimensional radioactive scanner, scan your body, all of you would be turned into a computer file. 0's and 1's. Beaming that information by laser to a recieving computer and printer built by the nanobots on the other planet would be a piece of cake.
Laser off = 0
Laser on = 1
It would take some time, but eventually all the information would be beamed to Planet X, and an exact copy of you, so real it would even think it was you, would be created by an atom-printer on the other side. Of course, it's very likely you would never be allowed to build a second copy of yourself, as that would just be immoral and unethical, but even the possibility of creating exact clones would then be real.
And that's how, I think man one day will colonize space. The technology is still perhaps a few decades away, but incredible as it may sound, all of this technology is currently under development around the world.
Beam me up Scotty!
- Phillip O. Sauffer
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