Interesting justification for colonising the universe. If you were from another civilisation, more advanced, you could see humans as a bunch of parasites taking over planets and destroying other life and themselves in the process.

This grand justification of maintaining the awareness of the universe is a bit of a stretch.

But I guess it would make us an "advanced" civilization.

Which is to say nothing of the riches that await us if we can solve orbital and deep space access problems. If you can get to Mars, you can get to a bunch of asteroids with enough gold and platinum to ensure only the rich will have things made of wood.

Further, even if a group manages to secure trillions of tons of common materials for us today, who's to say it will be given out for free? If it is, well, maybe I want you to give my country a bit more of the share than other countries, or I'll take their share by force. Even if we emerge a united world after something like that, we may find that we've developed far superior technology that has no use for the materials you've acquired.

There are tons of real-world questions that have to be answered, and it doesn't matter if we don't have time to come up with a good one, because someone will pull the trigger first.

The idea that all problems must be solved in some order is naive. There is no order. We don't know what the correct path to future desired social outcomes is, we have what seems to be within reach and we achieve it.

A few hundred years ago and you would have priests declaring the men who spend their leisure playing with wires and magnets, or looking at tiny things through looking glasses are wasting their time - clearly they should be working on getting more blankets and clean air to those suffering from disease!

That doesn’t necessarily follow. In fact one could imagine that earthly problems will provide the stressors to spur us into action.

The people who went all in on what was the new thing at the time have states, cities, islands and whatnot named after thing

Infighting didn't exactly put a damper on the Europeans ability to colonize the Americas and exploit everyone else in the old world. Once we have the technical capacity to colonize other planets I doubt a little infighting on Earth is gonna stop us.

The problems you mention reach to the very core of human group dynamics. Colonizing space is orders of magnitude easier than solving them. If and when we do solve them, it would make us an extremely formidable civilization.

Lengthy as they are, Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy novels are so interesting for challenging that idea, from the very first chapter.

In one category I see the stories of Star Trek and The CoDominium, / The Mote In Gods Eye. Both sets of stories revolve around a militaristic society where, even though there are democratic societies on frontier planets and back on Earth, the only travel between worlds is governed by the ruling group of technocrats who importantly are the only ones with access to interplanetary travel. These aren’t closely tethered warships like we have today: Star Trek plots are notable for the authority, autonomy and power that individual captains and their cadre of officers have. It isn’t explored in depth but Mote implies the CoDominium, the ruling structure on Earth and other worlds, is organized the same way the space faring military is run. Societies with a large military running the country day-to-day are usually considered technocracies (contemporary Egypt, for example.)

In Dune, the Navigators — a separate species evolved from humans — exert the same kind of authority over space travel. The fundamental access to other worlds is in the hands of their technocracy, though the other unevolved humans whose stories make up the main plot lines do so in traditional feudal empires. Maybe Navigators have their own ways of deciding how to run things that shows they are decidedly not technocrats, but to the extent that they control travel between worlds makes them technocrat overlords to everyone else.

Space travel and society in Banks’s Culture novels is much more democratic. Individuals roam in their own ships and all different kinds of societal structures are free to exist in many species and places. However, the over-arching control is still in the hands of the benevolent Minds — sentient supercomputers with a moral code that still allows for some humans to be involved in decision making, but only those humans that have been selected for their elite knowledge and skills. While the Minds have all the power, the humans call a lot of the shots. Decision making by only the most learned and skilled is the hallmark of a technocracy.

(As a teenager I loved this adventure and exploration focus; as an adult, I wish they had explored the Federation as a government and society a bit more.)

I haven't heard of CoDominium before, and The Mote In Gods Eye is on my todo list.

Come to think of it, I could sort of see the "technocrats leaving rest behind" in StarGate series, where most of the off-world activity, including bases on different planets, were actually run by the US military (later a cooperation of militaries and civilian agencies) in secret from the rest of the world.

Out of the relevant books I read, all featured either just human expansion (with no leaving behind happening), or alternatively remnants of humanity going out, with nothing salvageable left behind.

Re-reading your comment, I see you're focusing more on the "technocrats" aspect than "left behind everyone else". Honestly, having grown up watching Star Trek, I'm biased positively towards technocracy - but I guess it worked there because in the society the show portrayed, neither people nor organizations were dumb. Merit actually meant merit.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spacer_(Asimov)

If there's no great filter before our current stage, then it's extremely unlikely that we're the first intelligent life in galaxy, and either there's a great filter after that or many civilizations have risen already (and have had more than enough time to colonize the whole galaxy a thousand times over at a relaxed, leisurely slow pace, if any of these civilizations wanted to) but we just don't see them for some reason.

But our galaxy and solar system is relatively young compared to the universe. Plus the universe is massive. There's approximately 10 billion galaxies in the observable universe with and average of 100 billion stars per galaxy. At that scale the processes that created life on Earth would have happened countless times before. The building blocks for life are common in the universe but weren't common on the early, inhospitable Earth. It was brought to our planet from comets which is where the Earth's water came from.

https://helios.gsfc.nasa.gov/qa_star.html#howmany

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panspermia

Combine that with:

* The fact that life on Earth was possibly dependent on life from other planets to form.

* Has had multiple near-total extinction events during it's time.

* We're outright dependant on fossil fuels left over from previous cycles in order to get to where we are now.

* Our own species have been close to extinction multiple times far before we reached our current technological level.

* Our own emissions most likely blends with the background noise and are probably not detectable that far out.

* It's taken us countless millennia just to get to the point where we're approaching a technology level that will allow a fraction of our population to scan parts of our closest galactic neighbourhood for disproportionately large signal sources that happens to be on the bands we find to be most convenient.

To me, it sounds like it's quite plausible that we could be amongst the first to spread on an interplanetary scale (assuming we actually manage to do that), or that something happens and we go back to pre-industrial levels, leaving the aliens on the next habitable planet wondering why the level of noise from group of stars a few hundred light-years away suddenly grew quieter.

To make that point perhaps more clearly, let's say that before and including us, our galaxy has had X planets like Earth. Whatever that X is (1 or 1000 or billions), the total number of such planets that our galaxy will ever have is less than 2X. That doesn't rely on any poorly understood theories, that doesn't rely on any aspects of how life or intelligence might form - the lifecycle of stars is well understood, the age of universe is well understood, and the future has less new stars and planets than the past; we're currently past the midpoint of star/planet forming and that's that, most of the planets that will ever exist in our galaxy either exist right now (most of them for longer than Earth) or are gone already.

So whatever the "dice" of a suitable planet existing and creating intelligent life are - if we're the first ones (and I'm not making a point whether we are or aren't, whether that's likely or not, that "if" is an assumption), if X rolls of dice resulted in just a single success - then the remaining less than X rolls simply won't suddenly roll a hundred more successes; if the total number of spawned civilizations until us is 1, then that means that the total number of spawned civilizations until end of the universe would be 1 or 2 - and if it's 2, then it would be a hit-by-a-lightning-while-typing-this level of coincidence is that second one happened to arise at the same insignificantly tiny moment in time that constitutes the existence of homo sapiens until now, just some tiny 100 000 years after us instead of some 10 000 000 or much more years after us.

OR, possibly, there are and will be much more civilizations than that - but then some of them have been long before us.

Mmhh.. not so sure you can conclude this. You assume all rolls of the dice are identical (same likeliness of all outcomes), but this ignores the fact that the universe is ever-changing from a particular state towards its inevitable fate.

Consider for instance the "pulse" of galaxies as they collide and 'ignite' their central quasars anew — this coincides with extremely harsh local conditions for said galaxy merger, which becomes likely very unhospitable to life. Conversely, when the jets calm down (mature) and winds recede, star formation kicks back up and a new galactic cycle begins until the next merger (if ever).

This mechanism alone could paint a very asymmetric past and future set of conditions (relatively to our rather 'calm' present, but it's actually a cycle). Some of these conditions would definitely affect life (for instance, during its active phase, we suspect that a galaxy's quasar might be strong enough to blow away planets atmospheres).

There's just too many unknowns at this point. Drake's famous equation was actually meant to expose this fact (he actually knew it was flawed/impossible to solve, but felt it was a meaningful thought experiment, iirc).