Our brains seek patterns in coincidences. It's evolutionary! We can't stop seeking causal explanations in things that we experience. Nothing is a gift. Life is not fair. Universe doesn't care about us. :)

...but we can care about 'our' planet. That works.

I find the awareness that the Earth is the only place on which humans, let alone modern civilisation, is likely to be able to exist and thrive, to well within the likely timeframe in which we might well eliminate some or all of that capability (say, the next 10, 100, or 1,000 years) makes for far more nuanced consideration.

What humans do to this world in the immediate now will have profound implications to what humans will be able to do anywhere, in any possible future.

Earth being the only habitable planet is incredibly improbable.

We hardly have enough data to say that. In fact we've found nothing remotely similar to Earth in all the thousands of samples we've taken. So if there are any others at all, they number in the dozens?

Estimates say there are ~100 billion planets in the galaxy.

I'm also not sure that In fact we've found nothing remotely similar to Earth in all the thousands of samples we've taken. is reasonable.

Take Proxima b. It orbits the Sun's closest neighbor, is in the habitable zone (doesn't mean it is habitable, necessary but not sufficient) and is roughly earth sized. Sure, we don't know a whole lot more about it, so it is quite likely to not be a nice destination for humans, but it seems to be at least remotely Earth like.

So many, many things can be wrong and make a planet uninhabitable. Earth is probably unique in being - Earthlike. Such a delicate balance.

Okay, but now we've gone from habitable to sufficiently Earth-like to meet an unspoken definition of Earth-like.

No, he really didn't - he said specifically, "So many, many things can be wrong and make a planet uninhabitable".

What if Proxima B has chlorine in its atmosphere? Uninhabitable.

Proxima B is a tidal-locked eyeball planet - what if the equatorial stable zone still shifts enough to not provide a stable environment for life? Uninhabitable.

What if Proxima B encounters too much ionizing radiation? Uninhabitable.

Use your imagination.

You've managed to ignore the sentence in the post that I did reply to. You know, the other one.

You've also apparently not payed much attention to Sure, we don't know a whole lot more about it, so it is quite likely to not be a nice destination for humans, but it seems to be at least remotely Earth like. that I said above (surely my making that statement implies some use of my imagination prior to your suggesting it).

I think we're all on the same page here. Just because something is in a fortuitous orbit, there are still a thousand things that can make it miserable or uninhabitable. Even earth, aeons ago, we would have found uninhabitable. Its very likely we have evolved for exactly the earth we have. To find another anything like it is astronomically unlikely.

This whole thread is quite a bit tangential to the fact that Earth is the only habitat planet we can actually get to, and will remain so baring a significant change in technology. Rockets won't get us elsewhere.

So we might as well look after this planet.

A closer truth might be that life can only happen on a habitable planet so it's not really a coincidence or 'gift', just the way it must be if life is to exist.

Consider that the galaxy is 100,000 light years across so even if there are a couple of other habitable planets out there, we aren't likely to get there for millennia.

Without invoking abuses of either relativity or the rocket equation, current physical understanding more-or-less limits us to long-term 'generation ships'. There is some potential argument about cryogenic freezing/revival, but it may be more accurate to talk about human-descended life forms walking on exoplanets rather than homo sapiens sapiens per se.

Humans may not be the only beings on this planet with agency/ consciousness, whatever you want to call it.

How do you know the planet isnt a gift to them, instead of us?

This argument is flawed. If there's a gift, there must have been a giver, so why don't we ask the giver? Well the Christians already have, and they like the answer they got. Why don't you like it?

Well, im not the one who used the phrase gift, so this isnt the appropriate place to nitpick that.

Other than, 'some other group of humans told me this' what evidence do you have that the earth should be the birthright of humans more than that of any other thing on earth?

It's self-evident to me, but you might suspect I'm biased, being human and all. (Is this the right context in which to assume that everyone on the internet is a dog?) When the martians come to take the planet away from us, I'll volunteer for the Resistance.

A book I read earlier this year really bent my brain when it included characters working against humanity and for an invading alien intelligence. Seeing it in print was enough to convince me that it would totally happen, but I hadn't considered the possibility before.