That's one of my arguments for space colonisation.

In the process of colonising other bodies and planets we'll learn how to be more sustainable here. In other words we would use the promise of new resources and exciting new worlds to learn how to avoid destructing our own.

I'm with you on this one. Along the way on the amazing expansion into space, we'll rediscover the critical importance of maximizing efficiency in meeting our basic needs. It would serve us well to get everyone associating that level of efficiency with our greatest feats of technological progress.

Also, what better way to get kids on board from a young age? "Susie, if you really want to be an astronaut, you must learn to manage your downstream recycling better!"

I don't understand human psychology well enough to be sure, but I could see it easily going the other way for some people. "We've got a self-sustaining colony on Mars! Finally, we can stop obsessing over such petty terrestrial details like CO2 and plastic waste that we once thought were so important to our species."

I can easily see it going both ways at the same time.

Space colonization will be a strong forcing function for developing high-efficiency technology. Hell, it'll force us to comprehend the energy budgets to much deeper levels. I could see this resulting in a lot of new products and new ways of doing things.

At the same time, if on the social/cultural level, people start to feel that Earth is just but one place available to people, I can imagine them naturally care less.

Solving just about any of our sustainability problems on earth will be easier and less work than establishing a self-sustaining colony any place else.

Learning to swim in a shallow pool is _easier_ than just getting thrown into the deep end, but it's not faster, and the learning isn't as likely to occur.

In reality most people who are unable to swim and are thrown into the "deep end" would just drown, making it quite unlikely that any learning will occur ever again...

Why would colonizing the moon in a self-sufficient way be faster than doing the same thing on Antarctica or the bottom of the ocean? The only thing I can think that would make it faster is that people will romanticize space colonization so much that they will volunteer for a suicide mission.

Unless one of the byproducts of space colonization is the retrieval of a super virus capable of wiping out large swaths of humans rather quickly, I don't feel the domestic paradigm will shift significantly enough.

Fair point. Perhaps forcing us to be on Mars can teach us something about sustainability here on earth. Here's hoping.

We already have sustainability on Earth; it's just that it's expensive. There's no new science or knowledge required, just a lot more investment.

But, profit margins.

Science and knowledge can help make it cheaper, make those profit margins look better, and have it happen more.

We also have significantly more people on Earth though. If anything, more planets makes us more self sustainable in the future.

Not likely; the population will grow, becoming interplanetary just means we'll have more places to grow. It won't move the problem, not unless there's more emigration than population growth, and you can already see how that works on earth.

Most experts say the Human population will peak at some point.

The project to put even a couple of people on the mars surface, let alone let a couple of hundred live there, is currently too demanding to even attempt. Only vague plans exist.