alt Hacker NewsBe careful to note that I didn't say the majority of people would be living in space colonies, but that the majority of inhabited land area would be found in them.
Probably you're right that most people will choose to die on the same planet they're born on. Most people today choose to die in the same city they were born in, and most coconuts sprout, if at all, within a few meters of the tree they fell from.
That doesn't mean that coconuts' ability to float across the ocean is inconsequential to coconut species distribution. It only takes one coconut making landfall on a barren atoll to start a new coconut grove.
There are, in fact, a significant number of people who live on boats. There would be many more if the boats weren't dependent on docking to refuel.
It's a mistake to extrapolate from current trends when it comes to exponentially growing phenomena. In April of 02020 covid had killed less than 1000 people after six months. In 01770 two million years of human beings had managed to speed up their transportation from the speed of a marathon runner to the speed of a racehorse. You have to look at the underlying dynamics, and even then what you often learn is that the future is very uncertain.
I do absolutely agree that extrapolating population over more than a few decades is basically a cointoss, but I still thank that exponential growth is far from certain: Basically every industrialized nation has negative population growth when excluding immigrants right now, and this is very much a global trend.
I like your optimism and would love to see colonies in space, but I think it is overly tempting to consider settling space akin to European colonization of America, when it is more similar to settling on the high seas/Antarctica (right now)-- technically feasible for decades or even centuries, but not really happening simply because of lacking incentives (and the incentive structure looks sadly even worse for settling in space than either of those to me).