Charlie Stross is a science fiction writer who is finding it difficult to write sci-fi with a straight face. I recently came across an essay he wrote “to highlight the problems I face in trying to write believable science fiction about space colonization.”

Some highlights:

• There are places on Earth nobody would ever dream of colonizing: the North Atlantic and the Gobi Desert, to name two. Both of those places are a million times more hospitable than Mars (for example) — not to mention easier and cheaper to get to. When we’ve successfully colonized those places, then let’s talk about other planets.
• On the subject of other solar systems: the nearest star outside our solar system is 4.2 light-years away. It has no planets to visit, but let’s ignore that for now. (The nearest planet is 20 light-years away.) Suppose we could travel at 1/10 the speed of light (the current record is 0.02% of the speed of light). At that speed, it would take 42 years to get there, so it’s a one-way trip for whoever goes. But to accelerate an impossibly small 2,000-pound manned spacecraft (picture a VW bug now) to 1/10 the speed of light would take energy equal to the sum total of all electricity produced on Earth–for five days. Then, you’d need an equal amount of energy to stop the thing once it gets where it’s going.

Finally, here’s an interesting quote that bolsters the anthropic principle:

Planets that are already habitable insofar as they orbit inside the habitable zone of their star, possess free oxygen in their atmosphere, and have a mass, surface gravity and escape velocity that are not too forbidding, are likely to be somewhat [rare]…

In other words, even science fiction writers have a hard time saying there are inhabitable planets out there–at least, not with a straight face.

It sure seems like we have a special place in the universe.