What if humans colonized the moon of a gas giant in the Kuiper belt?

The idea is to take what I like to call a “colonization orbit,” where a human settlement of some sort is positioned in the orbit of Neptune as well as earth. By this I mean to not abandon our earth colony, just to get another human settlement in view of the long-term survival of the species. This comes with numerous advantages, but also quite a few challenges. Advantages include the fact that this 2nd human settlement would be straight-up un-nukeable because it’s so far away, as well as being drastically closer to the asteroid belt just past Neptune, providing access to minerals and resources without the high energy cost of escaping Earth’s gravity. The challenges would be in the immense energy costs to reach the Kuiper belt, the long and out-of-touch communicative relationship with earth, and just how alien the gas giants, their moons, and other bodies surrounding them are.<br><br>I’m no astrochemist, so I’ll purposefully speak in vague terms about the gas giants and what moons they have that could potentially be colonized. Let’s say for simplicity’s sake that one of the moons of one of the gas giants is an ice giant moon with surface access to liquid water, allowing humans to break it down into hydrogen and oxygen, the primary components of rocket fuel. These colonists of the outer solar system may have a harder time communicating with earth just because of the length of time it would take for light to travel through space, meaning a delay of a few hours for simple conversations. While it may be viewable as a burden to speak to someone on earth, there’s always in-person communication with other space settlers; and if you want to communicate with earth, who cares if you have to wait a few hours to respond? That’s what makes space settlers space settlers: they accept the nature of space travel and its difficulties.<br><br>The biggest challenge by far is getting to the Kuiper belt. This is where this idea of a colonization orbit really shines. Imagine it as a massive network of space elevators, slingshots, and wormholes connecting earth, the moon, and the gas giant moon. One possible solution is to build a space elevator from earth to the moon, then a wormhole from the moon to the gas giant moon. However, the technology and resources required to create a stable, traversable wormhole is unimaginable, and we’re not quite there yet technologically, as of yet. This is where the slingshots come in. By using the gravity assists of other planets, space settlers could travel the entire solar system using relatively little energy. Here’s a possible route:<br><br>1. Take a spacecraft from the moon or earth to the orbit of Venus. At just the right time, accelerate the spacecraft to a speed of 33.6 km/s in the same direction and plane of Venus’s orbit, bringing you to the orbit of earth. At the very moment you reach the orbit of earth, accelerate to 40.4 km/s in the same direction and plane of the orbit of earth to reach the orbit of Mars. You’ll be there in just 45 days.<br>2. At Mars’s orbit, accelerate again to 51 km/s and follow the same orbit as Mars until you reach Jupiter’s orbit. This will take 174 days, but this is because of the sheer amount of distance we must cover from Mars to Jupiter. <br>3. At Jupiter’s orbit, accelerate again to 36.3 km/s in the same direction and plane of Jupiter’s orbit to reach Saturn’s orbit, which will take 115 days.<br>4. At Saturn’s orbit, accelerate to 39.2 km/s in the same direction and plane of Saturn’s orbit, placing you at Uranus’s orbit after 270 days. <br>5. At Uranus’s orbit, accelerate once again to 44.7 km/s, following the orbit of Uranus until you reach Neptune’s orbit. This will take 213 days. <br><br>You’ve just traversed the entire solar system in just 907 days, or 2.5 years. The reason it’s so short is because the majority of the time spent traveling is accelerating to speeds of dozens of kilometers per second, accelerating to get to the orbit of one of our celestial neighbors, then decelerating to reach orbit with the planet itself. At that point, it’s more of a waiting game than anything, waiting to reach the actual planet in question. <br><br>The biggest part of this colonization effort is to just accept that space travel is, and probably will be for a long time, hella slow. We just need to be willing to wait 2.5 years if that means we’ll be the first humans to set foot in a new part of our solar system.