I left NASA almost 20 years ago, in no small part because I came to the conclusion that trying to "make us into a more-than-one-planet species" is a fundamentally misguided goal. This is not to say that I do not believe in the value of space exploration. I absolutely do. But I think it's a mistake to try to send our DNA into space. We should be trying to send our ideas into space because they are a lot more robust and flexible than our DNA. I also think that we ought to define our identities by our ideas more than by our DNA.

It is merely an accident of history (and a reflection of misguided priorities IMHO) that we developed space-travel technology before we developed AI. But that seems to be in the process of correcting itself. It has been 50 years since we landed on the moon. I predict that in another 50 years the idea that a human can do anything better than a robot in space will be as laughable as the idea that humans can play chess better than computers.