For the foreseeable future those involve a handful of people getting there as a novelty (in the same way people having been on the ISS for decades), not 8 billion needing to survive.

Not to mention they're still vaporware... Brochures are easy.

In 30 years Miami might be under the waters, and we'd still be extremely lucky if we have a 200 sq ft base on the moon.

(On which a man haven't even set foot for the last 48 years).

See that's exactly what I'm talking about.

We have a very real thing happening right now on earth with extreme consequences: major species extinction, air pollution, water pollution, soon to be ecological refugees, &c. But the answer is mining asteroid and having a moon base.

Why would we care about asteroid gold and the few (<100) people that might go to the moon and live an extremely strenuous life. It's not like we'll all go to the moon, crack open a cold one and watch the moon superbowl.

Try telling someone from a few hundred years ago they’d catch a jet airplane to an undiscovered continent thousands of miles away for a quick vacation. And on the way they could crack a cold one traversing oceans that explorers would spend months trying to traverse in a wooden boat. They could even buy tickets on a magic handheld machine which can teleport information through thin air to anywhere on the planet in fractions of a second.

If you change your sense of scale from a few years to a few hundred, yeah, I think it’s likely humanity will be watching the moon superbowl, in fact it’s probably the most dull and conservative view of the future someone could have.

We don't have time to wait a few hundred years for technology to improve though. The fate of the climate is decided in the next ten to twenty years. If we don't stop catastrophic climate change now, it's quite likely that technological society will be busy fighting for scarce resources here instead of building space colonies.

It will take at least a century of focused effort until an off world colony can be self sufficient. Think of how complex even the simplest things are that you interact with on a daily basis and how difficult it would be to replicate the industries that manufacture them on the Moon or Mars.

> Why would we care about asteroid gold and the few (<100) people that might go to the moon and live an extremely strenuous life.

scientific progress.