For well over a century, humans have dreams of settling other words, so it’s only a matter of time until we finally set out to do it. But that may take a lot longer than we think, the astronauts we send may not be human the way we think of it today, and a colony on an extrasolar world may look like some sleek, angular version of Dubai, or termite mound the size of an island housing millions of people instead of a just a few thousand. Oh, and the spaceships would resembles hypersonic gliders and missiles than spinning wheels and cylinders. And all of that would happen for very good and ever better understood reasons…