It would be more efficient with ems, but we can’t make ems yet. Technically we could already colonize space; it’s expensive, but still, it’s closer.
Think about why old-world people colonized the Americas (and everything else they could, anyway). The basic cause was space and resources. Of course, with current tech we can extract much more value and support a much larger population in Europe than we could at the time. But even if they anticipated that, it still wouldn’t have made sense to wait.
r/Fitness does a weekly "Moronic Monday", a judgment-free thread where people can ask questions that they would ordinarily feel embarrassed for not knowing the answer to. I thought this seemed like a useful thing to have here - after all, the concepts discussed on LessWrong are probably at least a little harder to grasp than those of weightlifting. Plus, I have a few stupid questions of my own, so it doesn't seem unreasonable that other people might as well.