It's critical that intelligent life on Earth learns to adapt and survive in the greater universe. Staying on this one planet is a virtual guarantee of extinction in the long-term.
Critical for the species on the universal timescale maybe, humans as we know them have been fine without it for ~300,000 years. Horseshoe crabs have been around for over 400 million years.
We might be better off spending the next couple hundred years focusing on making sure we don't destroy our own home before trying to move on to the next (or at least more comprehensive threat detection). There's a very good chance we'll off ourselves before we have to start worrying about anything at even a solar system scale, let alone galaxy or universe.
> There's a very good chance we'll off ourselves before we have to start worrying about anything at even a solar system scale, let alone galaxy or universe.
That's precisely the reason why we will be better off by investing into space exploration now.
Even if Mars or another planet were to survive the destruction of Earth, a stand-alone colony or space station would be doomed. At best I think we're at least 100 years off for any long-term self-sustained space colony... and it's quite possible we'll be sidetracked significantly if the climate causes widespread migration and famine as expected.
If we can't solve exponentially simpler earth-based problems, then I think we have no business in expanding, and would be unlikely to succeed regardless.
I support space exploration and development, but putting more resources outward when we have so many inward problems feels like a fool's errand.
We can work on both, but one's a much more imminent danger.
Your mistake is to prioritize climate change over space exploration and not some other industry. Spending on space exploration is tiny compared to, for example, consumer electronics or entertainment. Imagine how much we can save if phone lifecycle is five years instead of two; or if video games playing time is reduced by half, etc. So many candidates, yet you choose to target space exploration, an industry that has historically been responsible for so many science and technology innovations.
I'm not targeting the industry, I'm assuming that nothing will change when it comes to the space industry's current funding. No one's going to gut consumer electronics for space, it will never happen.
Given the current low-level of funding we should be focusing on defense (climate reliance, threat detection) rather than colonization. I'd be over the moon if space industries were better funded to do both... but more often than not total funding as a percentage of GDP has been decreasing, not increasing.
> At best I think we're at least 100 years off for any long-term self-sustained space colony
We think alike - but IMHO that's going to happen only if we begin now. That's why we shouldn't hold off.
> If we can't solve exponentially simpler earth-based problems, then I think we have no business in expanding, and would be unlikely to succeed regardless.
It's not like there's a single "we" that can keep attention at one thing at a time only. There are a lot of great engineers excited about space stuff, who don't care about ecology/whatever else at all. It makes sense to use their skills and enthusiasm while other engineers excited about that work on solving our Earth-bound problems.
Another point is - whatever helps us survive on Mars and the Moon will help us greatly to reduce harm done to Earth.
> Even if Mars or another planet were to survive the destruction of Earth, a stand-alone colony or space station would be doomed.
> We can work on both, but one's a much more imminent danger.
For sure, but there are also dangers other than climate change - war, asteroid impact, pandemics, rogue AI takeover... It's not that either Earth gets destroyed and the Martian colony will die anyways or nothing has happened and we don't need the backup.
Perhaps there will be another pandemic and the people on Earth will die off but the Martians survive. Perhaps asteroid impact will make Earth uninhabitable for 10-50 years but no more. Etc
I agree - 'critical' is sorta meaningless in this context. But the general response is - because organisms adapt for their own survival and our genes are selfish.
That's easy: because literally everything else is contingent on it. Either we survive and flourish allowing any of our other actions to matter, or we doom ourselves to extinction, in which case literally nothing we do matters.
We're already all individually doomed to extinction, yet this doesn't prevent most of us from finding meaning in our lives. And in the long run, any civilization, no matter how flourishing, is doomed. Conditioning whether anything we do matters on the existence of an infinite chain of future progeny is a losing game.
>infinite chain of future progeny is a losing game.
There's no need to take it to infinite extremes. There are always plenty of values in the slider between short-medium-long term to choose from to find meaning in life… whatever floats someone's boat.
