This is a really bad take. Do you honestly compare something that WILL happen 1 BILLION years later to a slope on which we are already sliding down that will cause massive real catastrophes all around the Earth? Being so close that you will likely experience it, and your children will definitively.

"a slope on which we are already sliding down that will cause massive real catastrophes all around the Earth"

You're referring to the sun expanding into a red giant here, right?

I thought climate change was closer than a billion years away. But I guess I must have been wrong.

Thanks for letting me know, I'm much less concerned about it now.

"you will likely experience it, and your children will definitively"

I'm old, and not a breeder. By your own logic it's not reasonable for me to care about it.

(the actual point here, in case it's unclear, is that if you're rallying for action on climate change while simultaneously saying that other existential threats are not worth worrying about because they're "too far away", you're guilty of doing exactly the same thing as people who said 30 years ago that climate change was some distant far-off thing, and only speculative, and blah blah blah.

You know the people I'm talking about. They're the exact same people who you hold up as an example, saying "how will our kids forgive us?".

The same applies to our grandkids. And their great-great-great-great-(4 billion years worth)-grandkids.)

> you're guilty of doing exactly the same thing as people who said 30 years ago that climate change was some distant far-off thing

Are you serious right now?

That's like berating someone who took a dive out of an airplane without a parachute about their smoking habit.

Actually it's not. I'm a liar. The time it'll take someone to fall 5km vs their smoking habit killing them is still about an order of magnitude from 100 years / 10 billion years.

You're either not hearing yourself or having a laugh.

As a counter, and to re-use your own metaphor, this position of "let's forget about mars and only deal with climate change" is equivalent to saying to the man without a parachute "you'll be totally fine if you just put on a parachute". Despite the fact that he's a smoker, has a missile locked onto him, and is busily aiming himself at the lava pool of an erupting volcano as he falls.

You seem to misunderstand that nobody here said climate change isn't urgent, or that it should be less urgent than getting to mars. Or that it's not worthy of more resources at the moment than getting to mars. The point being made is that we can and should be doing both at the same time.