alt Hacker News> I think it's one of the reasons we have to be self sustaining on other heavenly bodies.
I think this is a very naive take.
* We can't really live on another planet in the solar system. * Look at how far the next star is and realise that we won't get there anytime soon (probably at all). * What's the point of surviving on another planet, without any other species? * Without considering the risk of nuclear war, we are in the process of destroying life on Earth.
The resources we put on that project are mostly wasted. We should try to live on Earth, I hear it's a nice place.
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I think this is a very naive take.
We could live on Mars. Just a matter of time. Let engineers iterate.
We would obviously bring species here at home with us to Mars. And then new species would flourish too.
I don't personally believe we should colonize other heavenly bodies because of a potential nuclear apocalypse, but the negation of that is no reason to abandon space travel either. Every time we have launched a mission into deep space we have learnt more as a species about what makes Earth 'tick'. We can also do a lot without actual space travel - maybe if more people had heeded the observations of the greenhouse effect on Venus in the 60s, for instance, we would have less of an issue cleaning up our own atmosphere now.
I'm not confident that our place is in the stars, but it would be narrow-minded not to give living out there a go.