Certainly true. And unless we unexpectedly discover some “breakthrough” way of reducing costs of boosting payloads into Earth orbit by a factor of 50 or so, we are left with the only plausible prospects of actualizing “autonomous habitats in space” requiring AI robots converting asteroid belt material into the habitats.

The costs and technical difficulties of sending AI robots to the lunar surface to build and launch space habitats seem even greater than asteroid missions. In principle, we might be able to build small crude space habitats on the moon with stupid robots remotely controlled by human operators here on Earth, but we could build more sophisticated and much larger habitats using AI self-directed robots in the asteroid belt. We can develop the smarter robots quicker and cheaper than we could produce habitats on the moon with stupid remote control robots.

Hi David,
Assuming you are right and we begin a terraforming project, how many years will lapse before Mars will be a suitable human habitat? The answer according to scientists who speculate on this is thousands. Terraforming makes less sense than developing autonomous habitats in space.
And in the event we were to start terraforming Mars and then discovered a unique Martian biology, we would no longer have the means to study it in its natural setting. And finally could terraforming awaken a biology that could prove a danger to any Earth life?
I think terraforming a planet is a pipedream. And if I were to pick a candidate for such an effort I would start with Venus where seeding the upper atmosphere could begin to reverse the runaway greenhouse that has turned that planet into an inferno.