Guide to Getting Off the Planet

The world is not going to conveniently stop to let you off at the curb. And due to gravity, it won't even throw you off. So leaving will take a little effort.

Major Routes
1. Get listed. There are SCG's (Space Colonization Groups) that are signing up members. SCG's are interested in one-way tickets. They are serious about leaving Earth, shaking the dust from their feet, and not looking back.
2. Find commercial launch services that are man-rated or deal in manned space flight rather than unmanned payloads, passengers rather than freight. Let the launch service deal with the red tape. If need be, retain a space law firm. Typically they use rockets, launch vertically and are expendable.
3. Find one of the new aerospacelines. Typically they use spaceplanes, take off horizontally and will provide a round-trip.
4. Build your own spaceship on a design other than rockets, planes, saucers, or something we've seen before. Let us know if we can help.
5. Move to a space flag of convenience. The USA (meaning NASA) puts up stupid hurdles to ordinary people (taxpayers, voters, citizens, civilians and consumers) going into space. NASA thinks that only government employees should go into space because it is "dangerous." A stupid argument since you can get killed stepping out your front door or driving a car or serving in the military. Speaking of which, most of the government employees going into space are military not civilian and NASA is supposed to be a civilian agency. It's a crock and most Americans who have at least one brain cell know that NASA is full of it. Tourists who go into space have used the Russian Space Agency because they are the actual capitalists. Not us. If you have the cash (about $15 million but prices are dropping), then the Russians will send you into space.
6. Hitch a ride on a UFO. A so-called close encounter of the fourth, fifth or sixth kind. Warning: they do not respect humans or they would have established an embassy at the UN. Likely, you will end up their pet, their slave, or a zoo specimen. Contactees go insane for a good reason. Abductees usually have some sort of homing device implanted in them so that they can be tracked just like you've seen wildlife biologists do on nature shows. Cellphones don't work out beyond Earth orbit so ET (Earthling Terran) can't phone home.
7. Mass driver. Huge, expensive, and the G-force will kill you unless you've invented artificial gravity and inertia dampers for the cabin of your craft.
8. Build a RATO (rocket-assisted take off) rocket plane. Simply modify a jet plane. Your biggest challenges will be pressurization and strengthening the plane. If this is a one-way escape from World War III (as in Terminator) or an Earth doomed by something (terrorists with plutonium, solar nova, asteroid, comet, alien invaders, Dubya gets a third term, etc.); then forget about hypersonic thermal barrier heat shields and ablative coatings. You won't be returning to Earth. If this is a round trip, then you do need to worry about heat of reentry. You don't speed to get into space. Just altitude. Regardless, you need two other things: an airlock on your plane and arrangements for further transport once you've made it off Earth.
9. High altitude balloon. Again, you don't need speed to get into space. Just altitude. Little known fact: the first humans in spaces got there by balloon. Yuri Gagarin and Alan Shepard were just the first to orbit or suborbit. Not the first in space.
10. Build your own flying saucer. Ancient Vedic texts suggest that Van Daniken's hot rods of the gods apply MHD (magneto-hydro-dynamics) to propel themselves. But regardless of what technology you use, it is safe to say that your flying saucer will be using some exotic propulsion from the fringes of weird science. Avoid theory than cannot be turned into hardware within your lifetime. Within a few months.
11. Laser propulsion is whacked-out nonsense. A laser strong enough to push your craft into space is also strong enough to vaporize it. Isn't the whole point of going to space to avoid Star Wars and the Strategic Defense Initiative and Ed Teller's death rays? Why would you want to be shot by Reagan's ray guns? This just encourages the military-industrial complex.
12. You'll have to start a Space Exploration Group (SEG). Space has yet to see a Jacques Cousteau or National Geographic Society. Cousteau and the National Geographic are probably the best role models to follow in doing nonprofit exploration. ExxonMobil would be one business model if you are going the for-profit route to space exploration.
13. Space elevator. Lightning. Hurricanes. Earthquakes. Distant future. Vast expense. Waste of time. By the time we build one, other forms of transportation will make it obsolete. The modern tower of Babel. And just as doomed to failure.

Space Flags of Convenience
Whenever you build your own spaceship or rocket, do it outside the USA. The US government will harass you, spy on you, and steal your technology if you are onto something advanced. They talk capitalism but don't respect patents or intellectual property unless you are a billionaire or a big defense contractor.

If you are just wrapping aluminum foil around Styrofoam, then the neighbors will laugh at you and the guys in white coats will toss you in a rubber room and pump you full of the latest mind control drug.

People to See (bring your loved ones)
Places to Go (rest of the Solar System)
Things to Do (terraform)
An emergency escape from Earth means either you are headed to Mars or further out. A really nasty solar nova might mean you need to head for Neptune's moon Triton and try to terraform that world. Otherwise, the moons of Uranus are unpromising new homes. The moons of Saturn and the Galilean moons of Jupiter are for terraformers who have ideas about how to warm up in the outer Solar System other than something stupid like lighting Jupiter into a star (as in 2010: odyssey two). Terraforming is one thing but turning planets into stars is probably how we got the Asteroid belt. Speaking of which, Ceres, the largest is a good place to settle down. It is spherical in shape and therefore has a fairly strong gravity unless the mining types come in like locusts and hollow out that world. There are lots of other asteroids to strip mine and plunder. Leave little Ceres alone. Gravity is important for keeping healthy bones. Too much time in weak gravity or zero G and you end up like those blobs in WALL-E. The more Ceres is mined, the less gravity it will have so your patriotic duty is to harass miners and prospectors bound for Ceres. There are thousands of other asteroids they can exploit to their hearts content. Remember, you left Earth in a hurry so you probably don't want to have to live somewhere like Mercury (too hot!) or Pluto (too cold and too dark).

Rational ways of warming up in the outer Solar System include artificial satellites, pressure domes, fusion power, geothermal (heat from a world's core), and other things less drastic than striking a match (a chain reaction) to Jupiter.

Mars is part of the inner Solar System and it could be warmed up by installing a thicker atmosphere with a high concentration of relatively breathable greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide. We humans know how to heat up a planet because Bush and his ilk did it with Earth.

Venus could be terraforming by cooling it off with something less drastic than a nuclear winter. Nukes would delay colonization as we waited decades, centuries or millennia for radioactivity to drop to safe levels. Nanotechnology might make the planet safe for nanites but not humans. Biotech is probably the safest and fastest route to lower the temperature on Venus. By fast, we are talking months or weeks to terraform not centuries, millennia or aeons. [One aeon is one billion years] If we were really good at terraforming Venus, then we might learn how to cool it to one degree below Earth.

With that knowledge, we might figure out how to install the right atmosphere on Mercury. It is said that there are actually places on Mercury that are cooler than 72 degrees Fahrenheit. The hard part is keeping the Sun from blowing away the atmosphere as fast as you built it. Small worlds can have thick atmospheres. Venus is proof. Its atmosphere is thicker than that of Earth! Exactly how does Mother Nature hold down a thick atmosphere on Venus without Earth-strength gravity and with a howling solar wind that ripped away the atmospheres of Mercury and Mars? Answer that question and the Solar System may one day soon have several worlds with shirtsleeve conditions (no spacesuits) on the surface.

Farther Shores
Meanwhile, astronomers are busy cataloging nearby stellar systems. Some of them have Earth-like planets. The real barrier to getting out there and having a good look at God's creation is the government bureaucrats who have got it in their heads that they own us. Like slaves. That we need to ask their permission to leave Earth. We don't need their permission if we are willing to move to a space flag of convenience (a nation without laws that restrict where citizens can go).

Once you are out there: No taxes. No war. So much for death and taxes being inevitable. Of course, there is no breathable air (like ours mostly nitrogen and oxygen) and no liquid water. Hence the obsession with terraforming and getting out of spacesuits. You can't spend your life inside a spacesuit. Star Trek understood that. That's why it outlasted other science fiction of the Sixties.

But we don't need the military blowing up worlds as fast as we build them, starting interstellar wars, and telling us what to do. The whole point of getting off the planet is to get away from bureaucrats, the George Bushes, the terrorists, and the genocidal governments that toss you in jail just for saying that they toss people in jail.

Starting over. Doing it right this time. Getting away from bozos and their wars and pollution.

Getting away. That is the

A space flag of convenience is a nation with no laws nor regulations that hamstring travel into space.

Needless to say, the USA is _NOT_ a space flag of convenience.

The internet would not save as much of our culture as you might think. Mass evacuation on this scale would leave us culturally amnesiac because less than one thousandth of one percent at best of our history, culture, institutions, society, technology, books, etc. would be on the internet to begin with. Most of what we are is not digitized. Our cities, our homes, our suburbs, our farms, our businesses, our nations, our national parks, our geography, our Earth would be left behind. Cultural amnesia means losing everything as a group just as one amnesiac person loses everything that makes life worth living.