Mr Moron said:
Of course I didn't mean literal bubbles, I was simply trying to be colorful with my langauge. The point is, something is keeping the air in and space out, there are tons of systems keeping everything running. Something is going to go wrong evantually, an attack or accident (by said drunk guy) will hit something, somwhere at the wrong place at the wrong time. Then it's all over. Sure we have things like that on earth, but at least if things fail there is some chance of survival (deep-sea oil rigs, ships, antartic science oupost etc..). The enviroment in space is just to hostile to risk a large number of lives living there, it's game over the second you are exposed no second chances. Sure a handful of people on a space station, that I can understand, but a thousands of people? Too great a risk.
No, not too great a risk, especially since those people will have known and accepted that risk or, if they were born there, lived with it their entire lives. There are accepted risks in life: how many thousands, nay tens of thousands of people die in car accidents each year? Should we cease using cars because they're too great a risk? No second chances, you say? And? Is that your only point? If it is...well...I'm afraid that the risk you won't allow yourself to take is one that others -- myself, included -- would be willing to take in a heartbeat.
By the way, space stations are almost entirely useless without
real spaceships [not our...shuttles] and colonies for them to conduct service to, so why in the heck would you support a station yet not colonies? What's the point?
What I mean is everything I've heard about Terraforming says it'll take hundreds of years. Between War, Disease, Politics and all the other problems of human society I just don't think we could finish the effort. It's a taxing effort, I just don't think we could stick with it long enough. Something would end up ending the effort before it was finished.
We humans have done a lot that seem impossible. And even if we don't, it
doesn't matter. We will have adapted to the world with new techniques and technologies and ideas to make life there much easier.
I don't see how trying to stick it out here and dying is any less suicide than loading on to rockets and dying in some horrific accident.
The only problem here is that extinction is
not an absolute within space expansion, not within human timescales anyway. It
is while we stay here, cry "it's too hard" like the children we still are, and never try to expand our horizons
beyond the horizon. I'm not going to accept complete destruction, whether or not I will experience that destruction because I happen to care what my children experience. I
cannot support your comfortable, slow suicide of the human race. I will continue trying to live whilst you lay down and die. If we both die, then so be it. If I survive, however, I will continue on and eventually thrive. The chances of survival are made higher if
you would try to survive as well, but I really doubt I can convince you to take that risk.
) 
