alt Hacker News> maybe if more people had heeded the observations of the greenhouse effect on Venus in the 60s
We know pretty well what's happening on Earth and we have for decades. It's not like we just realised 5 years ago that we have a problem. We have not done anything (and we still aren't), but we knew, that's for sure.
> 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.
In terms of survival as a species, anything that's not about solving our biodiversity and climate problems is a loss of time. I'm fine if some people work on it (just like it's good to have people working in art), but a lot of those researchers and engineers working on space exploration may actually be more useful to the species if they worked on the actual problems we have.
This precisely. We're in fact nowhere close to a sustainable off world human habitat, with all the inputs/outputs such requires, not to mention the ecosystem needed to sustain such in perpetuity.
If people are really interested in perpetuating "the light of consciousness" among the stars, they'd be working themselves to death to make life sustainable here on Earth, where we're from, which still presents far more hospitable conditions relative to anywhere else in the Universe we've so far identified. Say you're a billionaire with such an interest - wouldn't your funds be somewhat better directed ensuring we don't annihilate ourselves in a mad max hellscape locally, before we suffocate in the void when the O2 machine breaks down and we can't source replacement parts because Earth is now a wasteland?
The Great Filter is us, and so far, doesn't look like we're making it past.