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The incredible costs of doing anything in space, the incredible distances and travel times involved, the sheer hostility of the environment of any place that isn't Earth, the complete absence of any economic sense to it.
As they say, colonize Antarctica or the bottom of the Ocean, make those colonies hum and turn a profit, then consider yourself ready for putting humans into near space long-term.
Those seem like engineering constraints, but also, the economic constraint seems obviously wrong. Economics can only exist when there are people or other equivalent beings around to engage in it. We know with pretty high confidence that the Earth won't be habitable by any non-scifi non-fantasy living being within a few billion years due to the expansion of the Sun. So, from an economics standpoint, there's a great incentive to expand our population to space. It just seems like a sufficiently long-enough timeline that very few, if any, people with power and resources want to devote much of those into making it happen. And there's a game theory-type problem where no one wants to be the one to sacrifice all the money and time into the R&D only to have everyone else free-riding off their work.
Technologically, almost surely building a self-sufficient base on the sea floor would be easier than doing so on the Moon or Mars, but the latter acts as insurance in a way that a sea floor basis can't. Obviously the Sun making the Earth inhabitable would likely have similar affects on the Moon and Mars, but it still decouples it somewhat, and also it lowers the risk for other planet-wide disasters. In the long run, for the survival of humanity, perhaps instead of capitalism, we'll need to invent a new system of economics that somehow provides a profit incentive to people for doing research and development into space engineering (and possibly time and multiverse travel, if those actually turn out to be possible in any meaningful sense - in the really long run, who knows how much universe in the future there actually is for humanity to expand to?).
Okay, pardon me, but any arugment premised on catastrophes literal billions of years in the future aren't particularly strong in any way. Human civilization is, if you want to be very generous, 10,000 years old. A billion years is one hundred thousand times that far into the future. A hundred thousand times the entire span of human civilization. Forty million generations of baseline humans. Looking that far ahead is just not practical.
The assumption that interplanetary colonization, nevermind interstellar, is just a matter of dumping some cash into R&D, greatly undersells the extreme difficulty of doing anything in space beyond low Earth orbit, especially anything as ambitious as colonizing other planets or even star systems. Skipping the seafloor and Antarctica isn't some pragmatic measure because oh, doing either of those wouldn't protect us against X-risks. It's solid proof of our not being sufficiently capable. Putting a self-sufficient civilization onto the moon, onto Mars or another star as insurance against some cosmic phenomenon wiping out humanity is an undertaking so massive, with costs in money and effort and resourecs and lives, many many lives, that running prototypes on Earth isn't a waste of time but an absolutely necessary step in iterating our way into space at all, nevermind to the stars.
But why am I wasting my time here? You talk casually of time and multiverse travel. I politely conclude that you are not actually serious about this topic.
I'd contend that casually dismissing such things or billion-year timescales is proof of unseriousness. You're treating the survival of humanity as if it's some sort of fantastical concept not worth thinking about merely because it would happen very far in the future and also require immense, scifi/fantasy-level technology to prevent. When, in fact, neither of those makes the reality of that coming extinction any less real or any more fantastical. When the challenges that reality hands us is so extreme as to sound fantastical, humanity better be ready to step up with technology that's so extreme as to sound fantastical, or else humanity won't be around any more.
Yes, most likely, making a self-sufficient colony on the sea floor or Antarctica or some other Earth-based location as a prototype makes perfect sense, but the need to consistently make a profit is where the idea becomes decoupled from reality. Because the profit potential in any Earth-based colony will necessarily be missing the one BIG part of any space-based colony; the insurance against there being no economy at all due to there being no humans (or human-equivalent beings) at all to engage in economic activity.
If you want to say that now, instead of the future, is not the right time to invest lots of money into R&D into developing technology to insure humanity against the risks of relying on one planet for survival, then there's a good argument you can make there, though most likely I'd also disagree with such an argument. But that's a different argument than that physics prevents humanity from meaningfully populating space or that there's no economic sense in populating space.
You're talking about timescales many thousands of times longer than the existence of human civilization or indeed of any human institution. How about we work on making those things actually sustainable over the long term before we worry about interplanetary colonization.
You might hand-wave this point, but it's not clear to me that we are doing this at all. In fact, there are many indications that we are outrunning our own carrying capacity here, or at leas our own ability to keep a complex society going (see climate change, 6th mass extinction, birth rate collapse). It seems delusional to focus on something so so long term when we can't even keep our population stable or stop fouling our own garden.
I think we can do both, and that the latter doesn't substantially trade off the former. Perhaps if SpaceX, Blue Origin, NASA, and all other spaceflight-related organizations liquidated their spaceflight-related departments today and devoted all the proceeds into some effort to make our generic organizations last billions of years, we would have better expected value of having the capability of escaping the Earth when we need it (because the institutions standing up for billions of years would better allow for the technological and engineering progress). But I'm skeptical of that at all, and, even if it were the case, I'm even more skeptical that the difference would be significant.
On the contrary, I think they're directly in conflict. Each rocket launch represents thousands of tons of carbon released into the atmosphere. I know climate change isn't a popular hobby horse on this forum (which I think is silly), but I believe it is one of the largest crises of our time, especially given the recent heat waves in Europe. Why risk even further climate destabilization just to push forward colonization a few thousand years when we're talking about billion year time scales.
In a similar vein, every engineer at SpaceX probably could have another kid or two if they weren't working so hard, which would be good for the gene people. And they could be working on more socially useful technologies. Although if I'm being honest, SpaceX isn't really the main problem in the sucking up talent space: it's finance.
I don't know the numbers, but I suspect that even getting rid of all the space launches in the world combined wouldn't make a significant-enough dent in slowing/stopping anthropogenic global warming to be noticeable. And given how well attempting to stop AGW through reduction in carbon emissions have gone in the past 2+ decades when it was being tried very seriously, I'm skeptical that it's a useful avenue of attack. I also suspect that the technologies we will need to make human society continue to prosper given the global warming would likely be easier to reach thanks to technological innovations created for the purpose of spaceflight. E.g. if geoengineering turns out to be required, I can't imagine having better/cheaper rockets around to disperse chemicals or to monitor large swathes of the atmosphere wouldn't be helpful.
I also think that whatever governmental or other institutions would be required to coerce SpaceX engineers (and/or finance bros) to either being fruitful and multiplying or devoting engineering expertise to technologies deemed by you to be more socially useful than what they're doing now would destroy so much prosperity and trust in institutions that it would strongly reduce both the likelihoods of human survival beyond expansion of the sun and institutions that live for billions of years. If these institutions are able to be so effective at being authoritarian and tyrannical that no one can overthrow them or create meaningful alternatives for billions of years, that might work, but running an organization with that much control and competence seems likely a lot more - like, orders of orders of magnitude more - difficult than rocket science.
So no, I don't think these things are in conflict at all. For there to be a meaningful tradeoff, there needs to be an actual credible way to redirect effort in one scenario to effort in the other scenario without there being so much loss due to friction or other reasons as to negate any gains, and I don't see that either with spaceflight vs preventing/mitigating the harms of AGW or spaceflight vs eugenics (or just preventing population collapse).
Also to your point, a lot of the monitoring of global warming happens because of satellites in the first place. We use satellite temperature data to measure how the earth is warming and where, and we use satellite imagery to assess when someone is cheating their emissions commitments.
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