Jack of Harts

Many humans have always felt the need to travel to new places and leave behind what they know. But this was most often a small-scale ordeal with no more than a single-family unit or so. The massive colony operations of the Twenty Second Century were another matter entirely. They consisted of tens of the thousands of human beings sent into deep space by the combined work of billions of humans on Earth, Mars, and Venus. What reason did our governments have to back the expensive colonial projects when much smaller and cheaper scientific expeditions could have been sent in their place? I have spent my life looking for the answers to that question.