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Notes -
See this is why I can't take space colonization advocates seriously anymore: you're extrapolating from trends on earth that have no real analogy in space. Colonizing space looks absolutely nothing like either the British Empire or Julius Caesar invading Britain because in both of those scenarios the various groups involved don't have to bring every single thing they need for their survival with them. There's just no real pressing reason to go to space: there's nothing super valuable we could get there that we can't get on earth for much cheaper (filtering sea water is probably cheaper than asteroid mining), if we really needed living space, seasteads or even colonies on Antartica would be far easier to supply and to make self-sufficient, yet we have done neither.
There are just certain things that are physically impossible and/or biologically impossible that will never come to pass. No one "has to" colonize space. We have no evidence of extraterrestrial space colonization (the Fermi paradox isn't a paradox if space colonization isn't biologically possible). You are giving evolution far too much credit. There are some boundaries that have never been crossed here on Earth in 4.2 billion years of life existing, there's no reason to think that life would necessarily be able to make it into space and expand throughout the universe. This is more of a reflection of our Faustian culture rather than of how life actually works. Life can just end with the sun evaporating the oceans on earth, and that's probably what will happen.
Current space exploration efforts are almost entirely the result of the one time fossil fuel burst we had as a civilization. We still haven't returned to the moon since the 70s, and the ISS was built in the early 2000s. We haven't made serious attempts at space colonization, other than a few probes, since Apollo. Yes SpaceX has made great strides in increasing efficiency and decreasing launch costs, but the vast vast majority of those launches are for satellites, not humans because there aren't actually that many reasons to go to space.
Resource extraction for Earth is an utterly terrible reason to colonize space, and I don't know why anyone would take it seriously. You don't colonize the Moon and asteroids for gold; you do it because of how differently things work in space. Because there are things that you can do with satellites and space stations and space factories that you either can't do on Earth, or can do more efficiently in space if the cost of working there came down a couple orders of magnitude. Colonizing other planets is a sideshow for the next million or billion years or so.
But when I'm talking about natural selection, I mean the people who are super pessimistic have a tendency to be evolutionary deadends, as do the people who are overly optimistic and burn through resources too quickly. More than just genes get selected for through attrition. Apollo was unsustainable, and Artimas looks like it's just as unsustainable. But the current iteration of Western Civ is unsustainable.
I also feel I should say something about the comment on fossil fuels, but I'm not sure I'm interpreting it correctly. It sounds like it's implying that, since fossil fuels are a non-renewable resource and we've burned through most of the easily accessible supply, it's all downhill for Earth in general from here? Because we kinda already used all that fossil fuel wealth to develop workarounds, albeit they are harder or more costly. But they are also workarounds that many non-Western nations have invested in the foundational tech and infrastructure for. If you have effective alternative energy sources, you have alternative means of accessing hydrocarbons if needed. Even if it's not for space, someone in the next Renaissance will look at Millennium texts, think that maybe having these things would be nice, and figure out how to concentrate enough energy to pick up where we left off.
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Jesus Christ as if my "lying in bed at midnight Sunday scariest" weren't bad enough already
Why? You’ll be dead and humans probably won’t exist anymore, or have existed for millions of years
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Speaking of Christ, the first job God gives to Man in Genesis is tending Eden. The next job that wasn't a curse was to be fruitful and multiply. So it could be argued that People of the Book are religiously obligated to preserve life until God says otherwise.
Hell, if we want to get extra Unsong brained, Revelation includes a plague wherein the Sun does start to roast the Earth, and after Armageddon a cube city with enough space for everyone and its own power / water / food supply descends from the sky and starts exporting medicine and raining fire on attackers. So that's ... fun?
... Do I really want to post something this off-the-wall after trying to be serious in the rest of this thread? Especially since Revelation also includes a scene where a trio of Satanic Kaijuu spit demon-frogs from their mouths to start the Battle of Armageddon? ... Why does the Bible have a Gainax ending?
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