dessalles

[The Dead Texan - Aegina Airlines]

[Image: one of many space colony paintings commissioned by NASA in the 1970s]

Colony, from Wikipedia:

In politics and in history, a colony is a territory under the immediate political control of a geographically-distant state.

There is no history, let alone politic, from which to draw a real definition of space colonization. There is a fairly extensive virtual history (or maybe “conjectured possibility space of space colonization histories”). From NASA’a commissioned space colony paintings, Gibson’s Freeside L5 archipelago, the Colony Cylinders of Gundam and Paoloa Soleri’s Asteromo emerges:

Space Colonization, from Wikipedia:

Space colonization is the concept of permanent autonomous (self-sufficient) human habitation of locations outside Earth

Lagrangian points aside, it’s interesting to note how the transition from geographic to extra-geographic transforms the requisite for colonization from immediate political control to permanent autonomy.

Distance is a funny thing.