It is because of catastrophes that we will move to space. Mega-tsunamis, super volcanoes and asteroid impacts are a little more than our civilization is equipped to survive. This will drive the consensus. It is a scientific fact that it will always take massive amounts of energy to move a human to orbit. We have yet to mass produce a way to do this. However, this doesn’t mean that we can’t. One plan is to use the Earth’s own atmosphere as fuel. Oxygen would be super-heated by a laser satellite to lift the spacecraft to orbit. The laser is powered by the sunlight and the atmosphere is essentially free. Whatever the cost involved people from Europe originally came to my country as indentured settlers who worked off the price of their journey. Future settlers traveling to orbit may do the same. In two hundred years, six billion people (or less) could “share” an environmentalist police state on Earth, or sixty billion people could live in space habitats.