See, Alice!? I TOLD you that space is waiting for US (humans) to go out and settle all that empty real estate!
I sure hope other stars have terranesque planets! If we settle into 'bases', we'll have 'directors' ending up as commanders for life. Other people think that settlers on Mars or Venus will be the hardy pioneer type, pure-bred individualists. I fear that base living, with all the communal lifestyle that this implies will mean that our solar system becomes filled with communards, like Japanese-style companies.
Well, don't worry too much about it. After all, you'll have the whole Earth to yourself after the lot of us leave for good... "Happiness is the Earth in your rear view mirror" is my motto.
I sure hope other stars have terranesque planets
Who cares?
Long term, planets are a waste of effort.
Once space manufacturing really gets started, some time in the next thirty years, where is the mass going to come from? Will we haul it up from a gravity well? Even if we get the cost down to $10 per pound?
We will haul from the asteroid belt by the cubic decakilometre, and build O'Neil habitats both there and in Earth orbit to house the workers, and their families, and the ancillary workers, and the teachers the kids will need, and the university, and the hospitals, and so on and on.
There will always be more people living in space than on any other bodies than Earth.
Small habitats, large habitats, mobile habitats, stationary habitats. You want to scoot off to Saturn orbit in your family habitat? Do so.
Your religion is all Jim Jones and you want to go off, you and your co-religionists? All 10,000 of them? Can you stump up for an environmentally self sustaining habitat which uses an ion propulsion to get you away from all humanity and out into the Oort cloud? You will be as poor as church mice until you can build up a population of half a billion or so, but more power to your elbow. Go for it.
Planets? We are human beings, we don't need no stinkin planets. Just mass.
Go homestead a comet.
Another advantage of habitats? There is not a star system which is not colonisable.
Hell, the Oort cloud might even extend half way to Proxima Centauri. Litter the galaxy with habitats, who needs a sun?
After several centuries of inbreeding, and massive groupthinking, imagine how xenophobic such habitats would be! It would be a case of going to the stars to find alien life- and eat it! And how do we know that Oort clouds don't have lifeforms of their own? Maybe 'Dark City' was prescient, and there are more terrors than we know! (I always assumed that the aliens were deep-space creatures which captured a space-ship full of hibernating humans)