because fixing things costs money. Even when it saves money. Money is the catalyst that allows anything to happen, and not enough people have enough of it to turn good ideas into good designs into good products.
And flying to another planet that happens to be completely inhospitable is somehow cheaper or easier?
When you realize there are no hospitable planets, besides earth, within our solar system - you will realize there is no escaping the problems we have created here on earth. No, they must be solved, not avoided.
There is no future where any of us alive today, or for many, many generations (dozens, maybe hundreds or thousands, if it's even possible) will be capable of traveling to another system with potentially hospitable planets.
That wasn't the comparison I was making. For the record, I'm all for fixing problems, but the OP asked why they were not being solved, so...yeah, money. is it a satisfying and good answer? no. Is it enough of the answer to have explanatory value, I think so.
I would assert a great deal of perceived problems are not being fixed because not everyone agrees they are problems, or agrees to what extent they are problems, or agrees on the solutions.
HN is quite a bubble, and we often form an echo chamber that strongly agrees with itself.
> Besides, how could terraforming Mars be easier than fixing our problems?
We don't need to terraform Mars to our incredibly fine tuned biology. What comes next will evolve beyond our limitations. Humans are a stepping stone. Just a blink of an eye in an infinite time scale.
What? There is no reason to think humans are "a stepping stone," there are plenty of dead-ends in evolution. There's certainly no reason to think that putting biological things on Mars will in any way cause them to evolve into Mars-robust creatures. Evolution is a slow, slow, slow random walk throughout which nearly all conditions have to be nearly-perfect.
Natural selection is a metaheuristic maximizing on the landscape of fitness topology, available energy resources, etc. It relies upon biological constraints, such as existing genes, organs, and biological functions available. It cannot make fantastic leaps quickly that would require significant backtracking.
I'm not suggesting putting biological organisms anywhere. I'm suggesting that at some point in the future an AI will be able to rapidly modify its own substrate independent of biology, metabolic inputs, and genetic inheritance. That it won't be subject to information loss due to death or other physical constraints. That it will much more quickly be able to build support systems for itself to harness energy and raw materials wherever it goes.
Unless we kill ourselves in the near future, these systems will likely emerge and will likely proliferate faster than us. They're not going to be stuck on earth with us. There are abundant energy resources and building materials in the solar system and greater galaxy beyond.
