The two main challenges in colonizing other planets are transportation and survival once there. For the first point, in addition to the economic costs and technological challenges, the very long duration of the journey makes the crossing psychologically and biologically stressful. Remember that The Voyager 1 probe has covered only 0.0005% of the distance to the nearest star, yet it has been traveling nonstop for 42 years at an insane 60.000 km/h (ten times the fastest bullets). Several solutions have been imagined in literature such as hibernation, teleportation, travel at the speed of light or beyond… The second challenge, and which interests us here, is how to make the environment of our host planet, most probably hostile to us, habitable. The most plausible scientific solutions today are either constructing a hermetic city on the surface, in the manner of the ISS, or artificially transforming the planet to make it habitable…As you can see, these are two solutions adapting the environment to humans…why should we do it that way? Wouldn’t it be easier to rather adapt humans to this environment? Remember cartoon episodes where sea characters come out of the water and wear a helmet filled with water…wouldn’t it be wiser to simply stick lungs on them? The approach in my opinion would be to first target a planet, and then to finely analyze its atmosphere, temperature, radioactivity, soil composition, natural resources… Then, we should explore about what biological processes could protect us and transform the elements of this planet into vital and essential ingredients for our body. Finally, once the process has been mastered, try to augmente us either by transplanting new organs or by modifying our genetic material before we are born… If there are interested investors, it is surely in countries like China that they will find their happiness. China is a country that is at the cutting edge of technology and where scientific research is much less subject to regulations. I see you mocking there!!! You will see, in maybe 100 years, where the rest of the world will be walking in very uncomfortable suits, the Chinese will be walking around on Mars in flip-flops. I would be really surprised that this idea was not well already explored in some literature (fiction or scientific), do you have some references?
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