True but I feel for the wrong reasons. To my mind, the single greatest challenge our species has faced in our brief history on this planet is how we minimize our impact on the finite resources available to us.
Researchers recently reexamined the predictions made in the 1970's book http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Limits_to_Growth and found the models are holding true.
The elephant in the room is how do we curb population growth in a meaningful and humane way. What's the point of extending life if there's a diminishing return experientially?
The models for upcoming bearpocalypse also hold true. Better stock up on bear traps.
http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/03/the-guardian-vs-inducti...
Even Bill Gates has written about this, more recently in his 2014 Gates letter, but also in the following essay, criticizing the doom and gloom predicted by books like The Population Bomb and Limits to Growth.
Or, how to switch to sustainable means of energy production to secure comfortable level of life for increasing population.
It's a bit of an hammer and anvil situation - on one hand, achieving sustainability will most likely require getting rid of capitalistic economy and basically tearing the whole system apart and reassembling it into something different. On the other hand, you wouldn't want to be the one denied the right to live and/or reproduce, and allowing for this will open a huge another can of worms.
Despite that this doesn't look the greatest challenge to my mind, conquering aging and death might actually help rather then hinder meeting it.
I think it's safe to say that 'think of your children' has proved to be less effective a slogan and we might as well try 'think of yourself 100 years down the road'.
I think this "filling out" sort of non-exponential growth is actually a large part of what is predicted over the next 50-100 years (from adults in middle wealth countries getting near Western levels of life expectancy), Hans Rosling talks about it in his "Don't Panic" lecture from a year or two back.
As for resources, we don't need to relocate to get to them, we can bring them down here. There are companies already working on it.
Besides, if we don't get things straight on this planet, we'll never be able to survive long enough to find another one.
http://www.planetaryresources.com/asteroids/composition/
Besides, if we don't get things straight on this planet, we'll never be able to survive long enough to find another one.
Survival is an argument for getting a lot of people living off planet, not an argument for not doing so. We can try and create utopias as much as we like, but that is not going to help very much when we get hit by a big rock.
Also, personally I suspect that the real advance is not going to be in settling other planets, but building habitats out of asteroids.
In terms of population control, it's all about lifespan combined with more efficient discovery as fewer ideas would die with those moving them forward. Space travel will solve for moving the human race to further inhabitable planets, but not without a solution for the more important lifespan issue which is a requirement for extended space travel. We've got 4 billion years before our sun runs out and before the Andromeda galaxy will cause us a bit of trouble.
4 billion years from now, lets at least be known as the generation that began to make an impact in this area.
We will eventually have to spread to other worlds, but for now, there is still a lot of space to use on ours, so we don't have be afraid of overpopulation in terms of land. We just need to figure out how to feed us all in a sustainable way.
We need to learn more about are species, we need to buy both time and food with something other than money.
We need to crack sustainability anyway, and it's best to focus on it ASAP.
In the long run, having a technologically spacefaring species is the only way for anything other than microscopic life to survive.