I personally am not too concerned with where humans will be a billion years from now. But I find it very exciting that we might spread to Mars in my lifetime — something I had given up on.

We will undoubtedly bring our problems with us, since our problems derive from our innate nature. Humans will not have a collective “awakening” — that is a pipe dream. We are who we are. I am not in the camp that we should huddle on our little world because we are not fit to go elsewhere: what is the point of that? All we can do is our best, and I certainly agree that we should try to do better than we have. I just don’t think we should set the bar higher than is reasonable, given our nature and our history. A portion of our species is competitive and greedy, and those are usually the ones who make things like a presence on Mars possible (unfortunately).

I also feel that our population is growing too fast: if we want to mitigate climate change, slowing population growth is one of the most powerful levers we have. Population growth also pushes up home prices exponentially, resource prices, and stresses every system. As one commenter here said, we can try to consume less, and that is a worthy goal, but I feel that any program of reducing our resource footprint should include a plan to slow population growth, or even reduce it where possible. There is an invisible indirect cost to having children — a cost that future generations will bear.

It might also be that to save Earth, we need to leave it, so that we can see it from afar, and see it as a system. Establishing a presence on Mars will lead to discussions of terraforming it, and that might lead to a more systems oriented view of Earth.