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Well of course you think that. I imagine that on the EQ and SQ tests, assessing interest in people and interest in things (linked here due to your previously stated interest in psychometric testing) you would probably be very strongly skewed towards the former. Most people here, including me, are not.
I'm personally not interested in effervescence or projection or power for power's sake, I'm interested in knowledge; I find the idea of understanding more about the universe we live in to be an inherently interesting and valiant goal, the existence of other minds not necessary. And unlike faceh I don't take it as a given that we're probably alone (and in fact think it is likely we are not). It just so happens that this lofty scientific goal dovetails well with the imperative for expansion, and hedging against X-risks.
That being said I see the study of human minds, human biology, etc as being of immense value as well. Porque no los dos? There's value in expanding one's sphere of knowledge in more than one domain at a time.
Yes, I'm quite conscious of this distinction! And this appears to be something of an inborn preference (or at least, it's a preference that's sedimented relatively early in life). So I didn't presume that I would be able to "persuade" anyone.
At the species level, at the level of the collective, we can allocate resources to everything. My post was more about asking why, at the individual level, space colonization becomes such a powerfully attractive symbol for some people and not others.
I think space colonisation has become an attractive symbol because it's an indisputable display of human advancement, and it requires a whole lot of technological know-how in a wide range of fields, possibly more so than any other goal. Developing technology that's both speedy and durable enough to cross light years' worth of distances, keeping humans in stasis or sustaining a viable colony during these prohibitively long travel times, setting up a workable society in a completely alien environment etc are insanely difficult goals way beyond anything we've attempted before.
Every step of the way you're straining against the laws of physics as much as possible - finding a propulsion method that can feasibly bring you anywhere near relativistic speeds is difficult, and if you do, there's the interstellar medium to contend with, which at these speeds basically becomes hard radiation bombarding your starship, its travellers, and all the equipment aboard. And keep in mind, deep space has no significant energy source to speak of, meaning you have to carry all your fuel with you if you want to power a ship (Tsiolkovsky rocket equation, anyone?). Don't even speak about Bussard ramjets that harvest hydrogen from the interstellar medium for fusion, because that's undoable too. Once you reach your destination, you've likely landed on a planet that's nothing like Earth and where the raw physical environment threatens to kill your colonists every step of the way.
I can't think of another goal that's nearly as difficult or aspirational as space colonisation. Not even "understanding how the human mind functions" feels as infeasible to me as colonising another star system or galaxy (and, unlike setting up a colony outside our solar system, there's no clear and hard condition you can point to as proof of success). Space colonisation just runs up against a whole lot of sheer physical limits that are difficult to overcome, and I don't think size and expansion is the only reason for why a lot of people romanticise it - rather, I think it's the fact that large-scale space colonisation requires bending the infinite, indifferent, uncaring universe to your will. It is an assertion that we matter.
Then there is also the possibility of discovery and finding ayy lmaos. That's cool too.
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