I completely agree, we need to solve for this Earth first. If we continue to ruin this earth, we don't stand a chance and even worse, we'll have a horrible intergalactic reputation.

I actually wonder sometimes how much damage we did to ourselves by creating various popular science fiction shows. As people can't help but believe Hollywood ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Availability_heuristic ), I wonder how many people feel subconsciously that space travel is easy, so if ruin this planet, we can just go and find another one.

Battlestar Galactica is not at fault here, just a future reality in some respects.

I'm definitely not pointing at BSG. I was thinking more about Star Trek, et al. (which I absolutely love, but then again I can feel the availability heuristic working in my head when I think of space travel).

Same with guys like Branson,Musk etc.

If any of our descendants ever have to worry about their intergalactic reputations, we will have saved life on earth many times over by deflecting large asteroids.

In the long run, having a technologically spacefaring species is the only way for anything other than microscopic life to survive.