What should be done to make humanity support becoming an interstellar society?

[Howard Moon]

baby steps

You mean: "small steps, Sparks"

[Shadowferal]

Nothing should be done. In general, long term planning is pointless. Freeman Dyson pointed out that technological or scientific plans taking more than 5 years are not useful, since the context of problems changes too much after that time.

I think we've become our own worst enemy.
The previous Industrial age was fairly explosive in terms of innovation and invention. And we've made huge gains since then but only in select industries. Profits are the driving force, and if an invention takes away future profits, then the inventor gets bought out and the invention is left to rot.

[dextersmith]

You're asking the wrong people. If professionals don't have the solutions, laymen certainly won't.

[Kraenen]

Is human nature ready to be expanded into space or should only a select few go? (which would be a neat form of the founder effect). What do you guys think are the biological implications and necessities for migrating to space?

[Dug]

Discovery of some dank space weed would probably do it

[PC2]

Symbolically? Land a woman on Mars.

In general, activity should be about solving real problems such as atomic scarcity. So if we can detect an ultra rich deposit of Platinum, Plutonium, Tritium, etc, that is when we should branch out.

[Ryzael]

Does anybody have a good answer for why it's so important we colonize planets/moons, as opposed to just building more space stations everywhere?

Seems to me like space stations is the way to go. A planet only has as much space as it's surface unless you worry about excavation, a space station has 3d space right from the start. More easy to control and movable. (I Think?) we'd need to come up with a better way to protect against space debris and stuff since no atmosphere to burn stray rocks and whatnot, but also no natural atmosphere or geological events to worry about every day like when's the next hurricane.

pretty much every space colonized movie ever is get to the planet live on the planet got a perfectly good life on the spaceship but a rock makes more sense and it just doesn't to me lol