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.