We suspect that none of these problems preclude space settlement. Assuming a budget of infinity dollars and a lot of technological development, a giant rotating space base with thick shielding might fix pretty much everything. We’ll explore whether that’s a good idea later, but the important thing is that the above issues may not be insurmountable obstacles. You shouldn’t think of them as necessarily deciding whether or not we go to space, but as shaping the constraints whenever we do go to space. The more science and technology we have, the less annoying those constraints will be.
