Couple points against humans physically exploring and colonizing space...<p>* Can't go faster than light (or even a large fraction of the limit)<p>* Cost. Look at price per compute vs price to bring something to space and tell me which trend seems more durable. Things will keep getting smaller while space exploration may not.<p>* Space sucks! Very inhospitable. I'd rather live in a biodome on a ravaged earth than mars.<p>---<p>Alternative things to spend huge amounts of money on:<p>* LHC and other research on very small things<p>* More telescopes in space (light travels at the speed of light at least! Let it come to us instead of vice versa!)<p>* Encouraging trend of cheaper compute (not that it needs it)<p>* Brain to computer interfaces.<p>* Medicine<p>---<p>What's to say some low mass x-ray binary systems aren't the final stage of life evolution? Super efficient harvesting of the sun and everyone living in a computer/black hole? Transcension hypothesis basically.
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We fleshbags have a pretty big problem when it comes to think outside of ourselves; be it from a humanitarian, horological, or cosmological sense. Our future is going to be pretty dire if we can't figure this problem out first, and stop asking science to panhandle for scraps thrown to it by government budgets that treat it like a monetary plague.
The problem is of course, when Earth becomes inhabitable, who gets to decide who can leave this planet?<p>I think it would be best for humanity if we first try to fix capitalism, giving everybody equal opportunities.
One thing always bothers me about long distance travel in space: You increase speed to get somewhere faster.... What about the slowing down part?!?!<p>Travel at near light speed is great, but how long did it take to accelerate to that speed and how long does it take to slow down?
Rather than solve the problem of not having enough resources to survive on Earth, why not solve the problem of needing the resources to exist in the first place?<p>Life will leave this Earth but not in the form everyone expects.