And the point would be what? Wanderlust? We have very, very big problems to be taken care of at home.There are times when I feel the need to give certain members on this board a dope slap upside the head. Fix it here. First. Then maybe I'll believe we have the skills to take our act somewhere else.
Do you also believe that the police should not bother trying to solve thefts and frauds, given that there are still murderers loose out there? Maybe you think there's no point protecting the environment here on Earth so long as there's still even one person unemployed. Or maybe you think there's no point in dealing with unemployment, given that the environment problems haven't been solved. In any cased, suggesting that we should only solve one problem at a time as a species seems to me to be so stupid that it is actually stupendously stupid.
Short-term thinking is exactly that.
Certainly space colonization is very, very long-term thinking, but in the very, very long term our survival as a species depends on it. It's ultimately an existential question--eventually we HAVE to do this. Sooner or later some piece of space junk is going to annihilate all life on Earth. Whether we survive that event is going to depend on whether we managed to become self-sustaining offworld--which is a project that is probably at least a thousand years long.
If we colonize Mars now it'll be entirely dependent on supplies for earth for at least a hundred years. After that it'll probably continue to be dependent on earth for hundreds more years--but for increasingly rarer commodities. Eventually, at some point, we'll become self sustaining without earth. Perhaps not only on mars, perhaps in other places--perhaps free floating in space. Who knows.
If we DON'T do this over the next few thousand years we're playing russian roulette with our survival as a species.
So OK, a few thousand years is a long fucking time, and the project becomes easier with technological advance. A couple of thousand years ago we were inventing writing. Now we've got space travel, and sure you could say, hey this will be easier in another few hundred years, and on the timescales of astroids smashing the planet, a few hundred years here or there won't matter much.
But at what point do you entertain the idea?
The cost is now at a level where doing it won't MEANINGFULLY impact the economics anywhere else. It's a project that would cost a few billion a year out of a global GDP of some $70 trillion per year. It is an absolutely insignificant amount of money to us now, as a species. If we can figure out how to share the cost globally so that no one nation takes a massive hit to its budget, I think the time is now.
So like I said it is a funding question.
