If you consider mid-term we should pour everything into de-carbonizing the economy.

Not to be pessimistic but all signs are pointing towards the world economy expanding emissions and fossil fuel usage.

It sometimes annoys me I was born too early to live in a possible culture like society.

Then I realise I'm happy to have been born at all, getting to appreciate the universe for 39 years (next Thursday) was a good deal.

being a newly born atheist/agnostic (ex-mormon), I have to say I never felt as spiritual and in 'awe' of the galaxy as I do post-belief-in-god, as I see it life is a miracle, to be able to be here, in this time of technology, to have a family that I adore two little babies that make me feel lucky every day.

To experience daily beautiful music like Queen, it's truly amazing what we have and if it is all random how much more beautiful is it that this all came from chaos? Maybe our chaos that is politics/divisions might work itself out into something more beautiful as we lift ourselves up and move into the universe. It's inevitable that life on earth will end someday, entropy and all. I'm hoping mankind doesn't. I'm hoping we figure out how to get past the great filter if we haven't already. I sure as hell hope we get past climate change, as that could be the filter and it's ever looming, even on my own children's heads.

The Culture would be an awesome place to live. Banks demonstrated that utopian visions needn't all be disguised dystopias, didn't he? Happy birthday.

Let me be the lone voice of dissent fervently hoping that mankind (at least in any form I can envision us) does not leave our solar system.

Why do we need to "colonize space?" Show me mankind living peacefully and within its means on our enormous rock, and then I'll get excited about us spreading elsewhere.

Until then, I get the uneasy feeling that what we really want to do is shit our own bed, and instead of cleaning it up, simply spread out and start shitting in other beds.

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Jeebus, I'm cranky!

Space colonization does not allow us to shit our beds. Lifting things off Earth is too expensive to move our whole civilization. On the other hand, successful colonization of hostile environments like space or other planets requires great improvements in sustainability. Space ships and domed cities are too small to fuck around with the ecosystem for hundreds of years before you kill yourself.

You could assume the pessimistic vision in which we never start "living peacefully and within its means" (and barring large-scale changes in our biological makeup and/or totalitarian governments you can't imagine, it seems likely simply from game-theoretical considerations). But even in that pessimistic vision, we should colonize space. Why? Because in that vision, we're going to shit our bed anyway, and there's a whole universe of wooden planks and feathers waiting to be turned into more beds.

Seriously, it's not like there's some intrinsic worth in all these rocks spinning around fusion reactors. To the best that we can tell, there aren't any other sapient beings around who could claim we're infringing on their sense of beauty. It's just us, the only ones possessing the spark of giving meaning to things, and a lot of dead rocks waiting to be used.

Personally, I don't think we'll stop fighting and doing stupid things, but I feel it's entirely possible that - assuming we survive the next few decades as a technological civilization - we will fix up this planet. And space habitation could be very helpful in this in multiple ways - beamed energy, geoengineering, moving some kinds of manufacturing to orbit, experience in managing ecosystems gained on running closed-loop habitats, etc.

Manifest Destiny, 20xx Edition.

Nah. It's the belief that we shouldn't venture out because we're not perfect that's kind of Inverted Manifest Destiny - the belief that universe is divine and we need to be worthy to partake in it.

I'm with you. I'm not convinced it will happen because we can't get our shit together on Earth. We're screwing this planet up, and I'm not convinced we'll ever even have the opportunity to screw up another one before some sort of massive extinction-level event of our species.

That being said, read The Night's Dawn trilogy. The undercurrent of those books is that we settled many planets specifically due to social/racial differences that we couldn't settle on Earth, but that aren't such a problem in space. It's an interesting take on the whole mess.

I'm with you on that's probably how it'll happen, but IF we're the only intelligent life in the galaxy, I also don't want to see the miracle that it is intelligence snuffed out, I have HOPE that as we evolve, equality will rise, if we become space faring maybe scientists will become the leaders as well, and will lead by intelligence and not greed and deception. After we get to a post-scarcity society -- assuming nobody 'wants' for anything and the ai robots do most of the menial tasks I like to think that all our great grandchildren will be scientists and the only thing left for mankind to do is research and explore.

Edit/to add: Maybe we'll be star trek and NOT firefly/star wars?

I'd love to be a Special Circumstances member aboard one of the Interesting Times Gang Ships. They always find the fund problems.