Let’s not send a few thousand people to Mars as a big experiment in survival.
The authors of the book in the article, Kelly and Zach Weinersmith, were also on an episode of Factually. Between this article and that episode, I’m pretty down on any cool scifi future in space.
I definitely think this is the cooler way to go. You could even put engines on them so that they could migrate around (slowly; I’m envisioning engines that modify their orbits, not allow for free motion). We could have space stations orbiting Mars and the Moon coordinating drones below for research and asteroid habs that can visit these stations for transfers.
But as the article/book points out, there are still a ton of questions we need to answer before that is possible.
Yeah, I think that is a very slept-on concept. There are MANY asteroids in our system which could serve the purpose. We actually have enough room in this system for nearly infinite humans if it’s done that way.