It's not pessimistic, it's realistic. It's just that what the parent poster means by "how we survive as a species" and what you mean are...different things.
Going to the moon, going to mars, are necessary for the survival of our species...on a 100,000 year time horizon.
At some point, something catastrophic may happen to earth. An asteroid impact, or a Gamma Ray Burst, or some other unexpected cataclysm. If a GRB happened to hit earth in 10,000 years, we only survive as a species if we're self-sufficient on other rocks by then.
If your time-frame of "how we survive as a species" is the next 100 years, then colonizing the moon or mars isn't on the list of potential solutions. I know of very few people who advocate that the moon and mars are the solutions to our climate change issues. Climate change is a crisis that we have to confront within the next 100 years. It's extremely unlikely that any moon or mars base would be self-sufficient within that time frame.
To survive as a species, the human race has to eventually be able to survive a fatal blow to earth and keep going. Hell, eventually we have to be able to deal with a fatal blow to this entire solar system.
>It's not pessimistic, it's realistic. [...] on a 100,000 year time horizon.
It has been 65 years since Sputnik was launched, so you are projecting out 1,565x that duration into the future. I'm sure you picked a nice, big, round number, but I think it's really important to grapple with how immediate all of space travel has been against how long our horizon is as a species is.
The first record we have of homo sapiens is from 300,000 years ago[1] - so 3x your time horizon. The founding of civilization could be pegged around 4,000 years ago with the founding of Babylon[2]. 100,000 years is about 25x the duration of the existence of civilization.
So I agree that space exploration must come at some point, but I actually think the most "realistic" approach would be to *ban* space exploration until climate change is under control. Fixing our impact on our own climate has fewer technical barriers and is a larger limiting factor to human survival than space. If the time horizon is really 100,000 or 10,000 years, then addressing climate change would be a blip on that timeline.
[1] https://theconversation.com/when-did-we-become-fully-human-w...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babylon
Edit: accidentally a word
I agree about the time-horizons. Dealing with climate change is an immediate and urgent priority, whereas the time-horizon for becoming multi-planetary and (eventually) multi-stellar are much longer.
That being said, it's all probabilistic, so it's not like there's a bright line when we need to be multi-planetary. A planet-killer could hit earth tomorrow, and the human race would be extinct. So, if we delay becoming a (self-sufficient) multi-planetary species by 200 years we increase the window of risk by that much time.
And there will always be current challenges that we face on earth that we could address before investing resources in becoming multi-planetary. And becoming multi-planetary itself will take a long time.
To me, climate change seems more existential than our other challenges. The reason we can use earth as a base for interplanetary exploration is because the environment is favorable to us. We are putting that at risk.
The only other problem that feels similarly serious is nuclear way.
Talk about cutting off one's nose to spite one's face. If we're going down this road, why not take it all the way:
* Ban climate change research until hunger is under control
* Ban efforts to curb hunger until war is under control
* Ban efforts to stop war until disease is under control
Hunger and war and disease all have the potential to make furthering space exploration impossible. For example, we just had a pandemic that impacted a lot of people?
However, in general, all of those problems have existed for the entire span of human history. I am not concerned about any of them[1] damaging the earth's ability to be a base for launching humanity as an interstellar species.
Climate change is different. It's especially different because of our inability to face it so far. If we had done the sensible thing and reacted to projections in the 70s by ramping down fossil fuel use, I'd consider is less severe. But we have not.
[1] save nuclear way ofc
The real criticism I have is that it's a false dichotomy. We need BOTH exploration and exploitation. Both greed and fear. Both mutation and rote replication. A species can't survive without a balance of both.
For fictional yet science based scenario see this Orions Arm article:
https://orionsarm.com/eg-article/49b46fd2198ed
The biggest problem is actually not to lift all the people out of Earth's gravity well, but where to put them afterwards...
The Earth is fucked. Not by humans, just by itself. It will be fucked within a few hundred million years simply because the sun is going to get bright enough to boil away the oceans.
If we want any hope of our legacy to carry on in the universe, we need to begin exploring the possibilities now, because we have the scientific knowledge and technological capabilities to begin that exploration process.
This is unbelievably pessimistic. You're literally saying that Earth is beyond repair and the only way for humans to survive is to move to a rock in orbit that we've spent a total of 3 days on in the past 70 years, or to a planet no one has visited that has radiation that makes life essentially impossible for us.
Assuming that's true, let's run some numbers. Assuming we can get to 3 launches per day (weather, launch sites, Mars being in the wrong place, etc are limiting factors), and we get 100 years of launches before everyone dies, and we can fire 100 people in to space at a time, that means the future of the human race rests on slightly more than 10 million people. The other 6,990,000,000 of us will perish with the rest of life on Earth.
Damn. If you're right then humans are going extinct.