/sci/ - Science & Math

>>11035713
Assuming your planet is actually ideally earth-like (with either neutral or actively useful biosphere, 1G, and an essentially identical atmosphere circling a nearly identical star with nearly identical seasons) you will still expend more resources having to constantly launch rockets to-and-from that planet for trade. If you build a megastructure like a mass-driver and skyhook pair or a space elevator then you'll be expending enough resources to build giant rotohabs like an O'niell Cylinder or Bernal Sphere anyways. I think if you're an interplanetary species who at the very least use laser accelerator highways and fusion torch drives to get themselves up to .5C and above, or you've discovered some kind of nearly-magical gravity drive or other spacedrive that actually makes intersteller travel fast enough for you to have an old age-of-sail like space civilization then colonizing planets is never going to be comparably efficient to just building your own habitat orbiting one. That's not to say you wouldn't have planetary colonies, but they'd mostly be for RnR so your civilization doesn't go space crazy, you'd go down to a planet to map and study it, make art about it, breath fresh air and stand on ground you know isn't artificially manufactured, not because the planet is valuable for it's resources, since everything it's got can be had everywhere else in the universe more easily.