Run it for yourself
The same tree, your deadline.
Every number on this site is worked out against one person's lifetime. Put in the year you were born and the tree answers the same questions for yours: how likely each stage of a human solar system is to exist before your time runs out, and what that leaves for you.
Any year from 1940 to 2020.
You live about as long as someone your age is expected to. No help from medicine beyond what is already coming.
Save up and fly as a paying passenger.
Here is what this page is doing. The tree's probabilities were estimated against five deadlines, which are its author's own ages: 85, 94, 109, 150, and no deadline at all. Your five deadlines are the same ages at different years, so each event's probability is read between the two nearest of his, and the whole tree is played out at your year. It is a reading of estimates that already exist, not a new set of estimates, and it is worth knowing where that reading is thin: how this is done, and what it cannot tell you. Nothing you type here is sent anywhere or stored; it never leaves the page.
That year has already gone. The tree was never estimated for a deadline earlier than its author's own first window, so what follows is the lowest it can see rather than an answer about that year.
First, the world
How likely each stage of a human solar system is to exist by then. This part has nothing to do with you: it is the same tree, asked about your year.
- — Outpost. Permanent crewed presence at the Moon, Mars, or a permanently crewed station, hundreds of people, fully supplied from Earth.
- — Settlement. Thousands living off Earth at one or more sites, partial local self-sufficiency in air, water, and food.
- — Slow Expanse. Tens of thousands off Earth, including at least one site beyond the Earth-Moon system. Transit times in months. Something mined or made off Earth sold at a profit. Transit fast enough that people go out there to work. This is the bar for the headline.
- — Full Expanse. Millions off Earth, transit times in weeks on constant-acceleration drives, children born and raised off Earth, a Belt population with its own political identity and economy.
Then, your route
The two together, for you
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This is the smallest and least reliable figure on the page, because most of it is a number you typed. The tree does not know your money, your health, your work or your luck, so it does not pretend to. Change the guess and watch what it is worth.
Put in the year you were born to see the numbers.