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That's the point. People act like "not forbidden" equals possible and technically it does, but only technically. Physics doesn't prevent me from slaughtering my way through Parliament and Buckingham Place with a slingshot and declaring myself Emperor of England, but it's not going to happen.
Being a population frontier has to mean being realistically somewhere will populate. The Americas were unpleasant in many respects, but they were on Earth and people believed they contained pretty good farmland, which often did turn out to be the case. They were also breathable, and full of lumber etc. Finally, people weren't really able to communicate with them, leaving space for hope.
Space just doesn't compare in that regard. If you can't make space at least as comfortable as the Americas then or e.g. the Congo now, people aren't going.
Sure, but I don't invoke the laws of physics to say you can't do that.
Making it that way is not particularly difficult as a physics challenge. Building underground domes on Mars or the Moon or a spin ring in orbit is physically doable, no question about it. I agree that it remains to be seen if human desire to do these things outweighs the difficulty to do them, but they're not laws-of-physics sorts of problems, and most of them have been on-paper solved for 50 years or more.
But you’re still broadly conflating ‘doable’ with plausible and rewarding.
The point is that physics precludes space being a frontier by making it so unpleasant to go and live there that nobody will. The same way it precludes underwater settlements - it’s not that we can’t build on shallow waters but that physics makes it less pleasant than the alternatives.
No, I am not, not in this conversation thread. Insisting that something is physically possible is not the same thing as insisting that it is plausible and rewarding. It is physically possible to eat gravel; it's not plausible that I had it for dinner and it would not be rewarding for me, had I had it for dinner (I didn't), but if you said it was physically impossible I would dispute the claim – unless you were a child. Then I might encourage your naïveté on the grounds that enlightening you as to the possibility of lithophagy at such a tender age might not prove conducive to your continued health and well-being.
I think it's quite possible that space travel will indeed be so dangerous, dull, and expensive that no one will attempt space colonization! That's well within the realm of possibility! But I think it's unusual to describe this as downstream of the laws of physics. Indeed, one might argue that the laws of physics dictate the opposite: a sufficiently large object traveling in space can be so comfortable that the vast majority of people who live on it would never dream of going elsewhere.
If there are any laws that dictate what you're claiming, they are almost certainly economic.
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