TBH, I really really admire those ancestors of our past who jump a ship and sail into the unknown. That takes serious balls.

If you meditate on this you will see that the amount of gumption doing this, especially when info was not so easily begot and Safeway didnt exist... jesus - humanity was REALLY tenacious in the past. So, if given the opportunity to go on a craft to mars with even a single digit % survival probability - I would do it, if anything just to honor those who have done the same in the past...

That's nice, but no one can afford to go establish a colony in orbit around Saturn by themselves; that money has to come from somewhere, and it's a huge amount. That means you need to justify that expenditure of resources, and get other people to fund it. Personally, I'm not willing to work my ass off to spend a bunch of my money funding such a project. An automated probe, sure; a mission to investigate the potential for asteroid mining, sure; a Moon base, maybe. Some silly project with nothing going for it besides a few people who want me to fund their fantasy? And they want me to work hard here so they can have fun with no practical benefit? Hell no.

Even with your "jump on a ship" bit, European exploration of the "New World" was very expensive and required investment from wealthy patrons. It wasn't something a small group of adventurers could just do on their own.

Yeah, but the problem here is that it seems unlikely that it'll be affordable to set up a self-sustaining colony any time in the foreseeable future without the resources of a large nation-state. And again, remember my previous post is talking about (and questioning the idea of) colonizing places other than Mars and the Moon (see the line about "except for a couple of somewhat-convenient places"), which are certainly the two easiest places in the solar system to colonize. I see I've been downvoted by some jerk, but of course no one can come up with a logical response to my question; how typical. So again, why would anyone bother colonizing one of these places (again, *other than Moon or Mars)? If you have that much money, and want to set up a self-sustaining colony and those two worlds aren't available for some reason, wouldn't it make a lot more sense to just build an independent space station? Then you could just stick it in Solar orbit not too far from Earth, or at a Lagrangian point, so you're not too far from or too near to the Sun, you're close enough to Earth for resupply in case that becomes necessary, you're close enough to Earth/Moon to take advantage of and participate in any space-based industrial activity there, and there's effectively unlimited space for space stations.