Colonization of the solar system

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Ruveyn and others:

We have no idea what gravity is. For that matter we don't know what a photon is or a "magnetic field".

My high school teacher used to do the magnet and iron filings trick to show "magnetic lines of force".
I asked WHAT IS A MAGNETIC LINE OF FORCE?
She couldn't tell me.

I said "what if I had a super microscope that could see atoms? Could I see the lines of force?"
She had no answer.

"Time" is different on the surface of the earth than a satellite in orbit.

As for a "Photon", is it a wave or a particle or both? If it is a particle then why can it go through six feet of clear glass but be stopped by a piece of carbon paper?

Why can a single photon shot at a diffraction grid go through not one but SEVERAL slits at the same time?

The fact is that we know tiddly-squat about physics.

We can make computers and jet aircraft but we don't really understand the basic underlying laws, just as our caveman ancestors could use fire without knowing what it was.

The proposal by naive idiots that even the planets of the solar system, not to speak of interstellar planets, offer any sort of colonizable habitat without huge technological pre-preparation that requires centuries of effort if it can be accomplished at all indicates how unfortunate naive and gullible glaze-eyes adherents of pseudo science fiction such as Star Wars and Star Trek can be. The colonists from Europe to the Americas came to a rich and fertile continent ripe for exploration and full of everything humanity could use to build a civilization. The planets and moons of the solar system offers only death to anyone venturing on their surfaces without huge and fragile technical support. Here on Earth there are wide open spaces on Antarctica and in the many Earth deserts that are too forbidding for present technological modification at our current level even though there is an abundance of air and easily available water compared to the conditions on the other planets and nobody is eager to move there. The seas which cover a major part of Earth are wide open for colonization and no real effort is being made there either.
The only remote possibilities lie in robot colonization which, in the long run of centuries, might be able to provide places for limited human existence
Interplanetary colonization is absolute total nonsense, at least for this century and probably beyond.

Wombat, unless you have access to information about the Higgs boson that the rest of us don't...

Gravity is a field effect, the result of the distortion of space/time by the presence of mass. Sufficient mass can distort space/time quite a ways out; the "frame drag" of the black hole at this galaxy's core explains the existence of the galactic spiral arms.

"Lines of magnetic force" are a convenient English shorthand for a rather complex mathematical concept, covering some of the odder effects in classical physics. Google James Clerk Maxwell and Michael Faraday to learn more. You can't see a "line of magnetic force" any more than you can see a "ray of light"; all you can see is its effect on other things. This doesn't mean it doesn't exist.

I would go on, but it's late, and I'm tired. Suffice it to say, we know more than you suppose about the nature of magnetic fields and photons. Please don't take your own ignorance of physics as indicative of the general state of the science.

We need a lot better propulsion technology and new power sources before we can colonize the moon or other planets in this solar system. I think we also may need artificial gravity and the ability to create shielding from radiation, because being in a reproduction in a zero-G environment could cause all kinds of birth defects.

That said I could see us eventually having people living on the moon and on Mars.