Life will go on in other parts of the universe, and all life, no matter where they locate themselves, will have some kind of existential threat.

And it doesn't matter how many Dyson spheres are made, if humans aren't dedicated to improving the collective opportunity to live life without suffering, there's little real 'significance' to extending the project of humanity compared to any other life-form.

> improving the collective opportunity to live life without suffering

You cannot eliminate suffering.

> Life will go on in other parts of the universe, and all life, no matter where they locate themselves, will have some kind of existential threat.

There's no guarantee or evidence that there is sentient life in the universe

> You cannot eliminate suffering.

!= improving the collective opportunity to live life without suffering

> There's no guarantee or evidence that there is sentient life in the universe

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24067017

I’m sure you’re right, although I’m not convinced that anything like human consciousness will be reproduced, which is a shame.

How do you know there is life in other parts of the universe?

Do you at least consider a possibility that life originated only once?

Let's say by chance we discover an oracle, that could reveal with perfect certainty whether life existed anywhere else in the universe. I wager, that if I made some non-trivial wager with any other reasonable (and educated) person holding this contrarian view, they would back down before the oracle revealed its answer.

This will sound weird, but I have no idea why anyone cares about the abstract "survival of human species". I care very deeply about the lives of people actually living here right now. But if Earth is wiped out, what does it matter that some humans are alive somewhere? Except of course that I'm glad for them that they didn't get killed. But we're talking about generations from now anyway, and there are more direct ways to stop people from dying here today.

There is the more generic idea of leaving a track in history, making sure one's offspring survives. If one of my descendants make it off-planet and thrives there once the Zombies attack/the meteor strikes/the nukes go off then my line will continue. I have no logic explanation for wanting to continue my bloodline, but I guess it's just a natural instinct.

The second reason to get off-world is the more far-fetched one, but assuming we can establish that other worlds are dead or sterile then we are free to customize it as we please without having to feel bad about it. In the long run we could leave Earth completely, allowing whomever comes next to develop freely without our intervention.

Because our code must live on.

Because it's not the end? I think we strive to continue on into the unknown.

Because we are all genetically related, and humans, like most or all organisms, care about their genetic code surviving.

It may be not obvious (yet it should be if you think about it), but humans, in a very essential way, are not like most all organisms, and "genetic code surviving" is not our primary concern.

Because it’s mostly a lie people tell themselves, similar to ‘I’m sure I am a good person’. How are you so sure?

There’s a lot of evidence that points to the fact that on a global scale, we can barely care about stuff geographically adjacent to us, or worse, socially (class) adjacent to us, but here we are claiming we care about generations beyond us.

Big old lie.

I hate this argument. There is no foreseeable disaster that would make Earth less habitable than any other solar system body. Even if every nuke we have was detonated, it would still be orders of magnitude easier to survive on what remains of Earth than to live in Mars.

I'm not saying there are no existential risks at all, but being on other planets would not make us any more likely to survive to them than to simply being very well isolated on Earth (which would cost 1000x less).

Developing space technology already has all sorts of benefits and it doesn't need this poor argument in its favor.

Well, there is the question of whether we will ever have the possibility of developing this technology again.

I see no immediate risks to life on Earth, and considering we're quite hard to get rid of, I suspect the human race will be here for quite some time yet. The ability to do a large-scale settlement on other planetary bodies on the other hand, might go away considerably sooner, and who knows if/when we will be able to do it again if we ever end up in a situation where it might be needed.

Regardless, there are other reasons, as you say. For one, space-based manufacturing would allow us to increase the standard of living on Earth without having to worry about things like CO2 levels and pollution. If we start commercializing space then I expect colonization to follow as a natural result of that and we won't have to worry about the more philosophical side.

Every comment of this nature overlooks the challenge of politics and territory. Any significant social experiment is basically impossible on Earth because every space and person is claimed property by an existing state.

Mars would also offer cultural redundancy. Also, sometimes people choose to do things brcause they are hard.

> Every comment of this nature overlooks the challenge of politics and territory

If I were a betting person, I'm not sure I'd go all-in on a CEO-Emperor-King of Mars over existing nation-states on Terra

Is that a bet on a basically functional society, or a bet on which place is better to live in for individual?

It's not a matter of Earth becoming uninhabitable. You're right that it would take a lot to do that, though it is possible with a large enough asteroid or some unexpectedly fast acting runaway greenhouse effect. The problem is of human civilization continuing at its current level and continuing to advance. Any number of small disasters could set us back hundreds if not thousands of years. We have direct evidence and record of this happening multiple times throughout human history so we know it can and probably will happen. That's why we need a self-sustaining society elsewhere, preferably far enough away to resist whatever disaster causes Earth to fall.

But only if you already developed technology needed to survive on mars and have an industrial base not touched by those nukes.

Having a self-sustaining outpost somewhere other than earth is valuable not only for its own sake, but also due to the developed technology and industry and infrastructure implied by its existence.

If tomorrow you suddenly need a huge fleet of fully reusable ships for some reason, the right time to start working on them was 20 years ago, or as soon as basic science and technology level allow.

There are also political risks (we are all too close to each other).

The fact is, and it may sound like a paradox, that, for more than one reason, it is the humans themselves that is the biggest danger to their own existence in the long term.

If there was a full scale nuclear war. And then the next week the Yellowstone super volcano erupted. And then the week after that an asteroid as big as the one that killed the dinosaurs hit Eurasia, earth would still be wildly more habitable that Mars.

And after a collision like the one that created the moon? How habitable during a gamma ray burst?

... and wha' if Earth jus' 'splodes one day... (takes another sip)

That's a bit too much, but we still have a few month left in 2020...