Editing Freeman Dyson (section)

===Space colonies===
{{Blockquote | style=font-size:100% | I've done some historical research on the costs of the Mayflower's voyage, and on the Mormons' emigration to Utah, and I think it's possible to go into space on a much smaller scale. A cost on the order of $40,000 per person [1978 dollars, $181,600 in 2022 dollars] would be the target to shoot for; in terms of real wages, that would make it comparable to the colonization of America. Unless it's brought down to that level it's not really interesting to me, because otherwise, it would be a luxury that only governments could afford. |source= {{harvnb|Davis|1978}}}}

Dyson was interested in space travel since he was a child, reading such science fiction classics as [[Olaf Stapledon]]'s ''[[Star Maker]]''. As a young man, he worked for [[General Atomics]] on the nuclear-powered [[Project Orion (nuclear propulsion)|Orion]] spacecraft. He hoped Project Orion would put men on Mars by 1965, and Saturn by 1970. For a quarter-century, Dyson was unhappy about how the government conducted space travel:
{{Blockquote | style=font-size:100% | The problem is, of course, that they can't afford to fail. The rules of the game are that you don't take a chance, because if you fail, then probably your whole program gets wiped out. |source= {{harvnb|Davis|1978}}}}

Dyson still hoped for cheap space travel, but was resigned to waiting for private entrepreneurs to develop something new and inexpensive.

{{Blockquote | style=font-size:100% | No law of physics or biology forbids cheap travel and settlement all over the solar system and beyond. But it is impossible to predict how long this will take. Predictions of the dates of future achievements are notoriously fallible. My guess is that the era of cheap unmanned missions will be the next fifty years, and the era of cheap manned missions will start sometime late in the twenty-first century.

Any affordable program of manned exploration must be centred in biology, and its time frame tied to the time frame of biotechnology; a hundred years, roughly the time it will take us to learn to grow warm-blooded plants, is probably reasonable. |source={{harvnb|Dyson|1997}} }}
<!-- Dyson also proposed the use of bioengineered space colonies to colonize the Kuiper Belt on the outer edge of our Solar System. He proposed that habitats could be grown from space hardened spores. The colonies could then be warmed by large reflector plant leaves that could focus the dim, distant sunlight back on the growing colony. This was illustrated by [[Pat Rawlings]] on the cover of the National Space Society's ''Ad Astra'' magazine. -->