I think the idea they are suggesting is that if we can figure out how to terraform Mars and create a livable atmosphere from scratch, the tech and domain knowledge created along the way means cleaning up our atmosphere should be easy in comparison.

Kind of like Olympic gymnasts lift weights and work on flexibility and they want to exceed what their performances require such that the performance is easy and not pushing them to the limits of their ability.

Ie "You have to crawl before you can walk. If you learn to run, walking becomes trivial in comparison."

If that makes sense.

This analogy only makes sense if the world’s problems were that of technology. We have ample evidence that it is not.

There exists technology that can transport people over short to medium distances really efficiently and without much greenhouse gas emissions. All it would take would be for policy makers to allocate some funding to build out the infrastructure required, yet they don’t.

There exists technology to transport and distribute food wherever there is hunger. Even technology to grow food more efficiently and without additional greenhouse gas emissions. Yet we don’t apply that.

Most countries continue to pour money into their most devastating government institutions (the military and the police) that not only cause a world of societal problems on their own, but also pollute a bunch in the meantime for everybody else. At the same time they could be using that money to build infrastructure that would allow us to live a more sustainable lives. But they don’t.

If the technology existed that would take people to Proxima Centauri in 10 years, and we invented a bunch of good technology that would help us make our current world better. I bet this new technology would be used equally sparingly as our current technology.

I don't actually disagree with you. But I also know that a lot of tech in use today was born of our efforts to solve problems in space exploration, so I also don't entirely disagree with the line of reasoning that space exploration requires us to meet such a high bar that inventions that grow out of it end up being essentially trivial to implement here on earth.

I'm personally heavily invested in the pieces of the puzzle that tech, per se, cannot solve. My work in that regard gets little in the way of attention and people have long attacked me as a nutter, etc.

I run a citizen planners forum on Reddit. I try to write about local community development at eclogiselle.com. Sometimes something I wrote gets a few thousand page views, but most of what I write gets very little traffic and that seems to be generally trending down, not up.

And I have mixed feelings about that because I have actively sought to ditch traffic rooted in lurid interest in me, so that's sort of "huzzah. I win? I guess."

I would like to see more focus on passive solar design. I would like to see more development of missing middle housing. I would like to see more walkable, bikable communities where Americans can actually live without a car.

I would like to see social change of the sort that's needed to actually solve these problems with the currently available tech. The problem I see is that tends to require a charismatic leader of the sort that historically founded various religions and I see problems with that approach.

I think it's inherently problematic to just take someone's word for it and do as you are told because they said so and you basically worship them. People need to think for themselves, not dutifully do as they were told.

And I don't know how you put out good info to foster the right kind of change in the amount needed etc and do so in a way that sidesteps the tendency for leaders of any sort to dictate what others should do.

So I have kept my footprint intentionally small in some sense while I figure out best practices. "If you don't have time to do it right the first time, when are you going to find time to do it over?"

Best.

Precisely! We have the technology, but I think people do not realize we have the technology. They think to tackle climate change, we have to reduce our ambitions for the future (which isn't true) or that human life depends essentially on fossil fuels. There are no fossil fuels in space. That is why space travel and tackling climate change go hand in hand: space travel is tangible evidence of civilizational capacity, that we can do ambitious things even harder than fighting climate change (and we don't even have to spend THAT much to do those things) and we don't need fossil fuels to do it. It also provides an essential kind of perspective that I really think is essential to broad-based environmental consciousness. In the words of Carl Sagan: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Xtly-dpBeA

We can start it in a few years. And it can assist in part by just showing that we have a societal capacity to do great things. In the words of Carl Sagan: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Xtly-dpBeA

(And we don't need to and probably shouldn't spend a lot on this. What we currently spend on space exploration/settlement through agencies like NASA is sufficient for this. And we also get the spin-off technology advantages.)

We have about a decade to start taking “saving the earth” (from CO2 in particular) seriously, not to complete the task.

I’m moderately optimistic.