> Yeah right, how much does it cost to ship 1kg in space again ?

a moon base would cost upwards of 20 billion USD.

the increase in the US military budget for FY2018 is 58 billion USD, bringing it to a total of 639 billion USD. that's just for FY2018. there is currently no world war.

> Do we even have the raw resources on earth / the tech to move everyone to a new planet and terraform it before we're all toast ?

no one mentioned anything about terraforming or moving people in this thread. i made a comment regarding finite resources, which aren't finite if you just look at the sky instead of the ground.

>a moon base would cost upwards of 20 billion USD.

It doesn;t have much to do with the original topic, but I think you're way underestimating it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ouiTMXuDAQ

"A moon base" meaning what in this context? I'm guessing it means a NASA research based designed to host no more than a dozen astronauts at a time. That number is basically meaningless when it comes to colonization. We simply don't have the technology to establish an independent colony on the moon. We might be able to do it on Mars, but it will cost trillions of dollars.

> Even if we do what's your moral standpoint on the fact that humanity destroyed 3+ billion years of evolution on earth in a few hundred years ?

didn't the earth go thru numerous planet-wide extinction events? and those were much much faster than a few hundred years.

The very big difference is that we are, at least partially, causing it, aware of it, aware it's going to be bad, and we know how to improve it. So we're making the decision, as a specie, not to care.

But sure in the big scheme of things it's not changing much, it's more of a personal / moral position.

But plenty of things cause extinction events, hell humans were causing the Wolly Mammoth to go extinct long before we had anything resembling a civilization. Plenty of other plants and animals will drive other animals to extinction. It’s the circle of life, one which we, being animals, are a part of.

I don't think that's where the question is. The issue is that other species dying might very well take us down too. It's an ecosystem where everything is interconnected, sure you can remove a few species here and there and nothing will change, but remove enough of them and we'll start seeing the consequences.

A good analogy is the Eiffel tower, you can remove a bolt, 10 bolts, 100 bolts, it'll still hold fine, remove one too many and it'll collapse. The metal will still be there (earth) but it won't be the Eiffel tower anymore (Life).

> The current rate of extinction of species is estimated at 100 to 1,000 times higher than natural background rates.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_extinction

When I say about confusion in climate discussions (like elsewhere in the thread), I talk about precisely this. You arrived at the correct (IMO) conclusion that the primary and pressing issue with environmental damage is that systems humans depend on to live may collapse at some point, possibly quite suddenly. But in comments upthread, you argued about moral issues of letting species die. Those are two very separate problems! One of them is an issue of conscience, the other is an impending catastrophe that threatens to kill a lot of people and make even more suffer, and could likely be a civilization-ending process. I think bundling them together (which is common) is making people in general less receptive to the changes that need to be done.

Yes, but we weren't there as a civilization then. And the next one could wipe us all out.

In which case it will be little consolation that amoebas or even cockroaches and squirrels might survive...

Those are all much better arguments than your previous one. Be careful about doing a "motte and bailey", even if inadvertently.