If we do find life out there, can we send people there to explore it with current technology? Well, no. We have found nearly 4000 exoplanets so far, and NASA has predicted that we will find evidence of life out there within decades. We are already working on the technology to find other inhabited worlds. If this is not so, the total cost of the project would be even further out of reach. To support a project of this magnitude, the industry would need to be mature enough to provide the resources required on-demand at a price that is comparable to mining here at home. There are people working on that already, but so far, no asteroid has been mined. So the primary thing we are missing right now, in terms of resources, is a space mining industry. While some necessary trace elements could be mined on a planet and sent up, the bulk of the building material needs to come from asteroids or comets. So where do we get the materials that we would build a starship from? They need to be in space already, not in the gravity well of another planet, but just floating around out there. Likewise, sending the resources to build the vehicle piecemeal would be too costly. ResourcesĪs you mentioned already, you don't want to build the thing here on the planet, because launching it up there would be too costly. The only motive I can imagine outside of the world of religion would be the opportunity to travel to other inhabited worlds. For the organizations dedicated to exploration within the solar system, like NASA, funding is a constant battle, and amounts to a fraction of a percent of the budget that would be required for an Enterprise class starship. With current technology, we cannot realistically explore outside of our solar system. There is no one to govern in space right now. In Star Wars, the motive is heavy-handed governance. Building something the size of a city in space which can not only house hundreds or thousands of people, but also has the ability to accelerate to incredible speeds would need some extraordinary motive. And even then, it is for some specific purpose. It's very rare for a city to be built from scratch at the direction of a wealthy person or entity. People gather in an area because there is a resource there, or something useful going on there. Here on Earth, cities emerge for economic purpose. But every advantage of space construction will be outweighed by numerous challenges, which I will go into more later. You wouldn't need cranes, and there would be no "heavy lifting" of the same sort when heaviness is no longer a thing, per se. Building without gravity would come with some advantages. Motivationīuilding a starship the size of a city is a much greater challenge than building an earthly city. Enormous projects like those require the necessary motivation, resources, and technology. You are correct that it would be impractical to build such behemoths on a planet.
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