Should have read more of the thread I spawned before responding to your other comments.

So to me, it seems like the real solution is to begin interplanetary colonization.

That doesn’t fix the problems on Earth, and I don’t want to pretend it does. I also want to be clear that the way that Musk and Bezos seem to envision interplanetary expansion is…not desirable.

But to me, beginning the Terraforming of Mars is a crucial step in human progress. There’s no ecology or biosphere for humans to ruin, but if we can establish a foothold for humans to live there, it let’s off the steam valve of humanity on Earth’s biosphere and let’s us begin the real work of fixing our biosphere without resorting to mass human death.

That probably sounds like a tech-bro pipe dream, and maybe it is, but it also feels like the kind of thing humans will eventually need to do if we want to survive as a species (my main drive for it is so humans can survive the next asteroid, which is a whole issue unto itself).