Maybe I'm misunderstanding but you seem to be saying "Let's not be excited about colonizing another planet-- life will be just as depressing there."
Think about it this way. What if there was an uninhabited island out in the Pacific that was hard to get to. What makes it worth trying to get to? There isn't anything any more special there than here. In fact from all we've seen so far it's much less special. Same goes for Mars.
What is the value in being "multi-planetary?" I mean the idea that this is a hedge against some existential threat to humanity is silly. Mars is more hostile to human life TODAY than earth would be after a massive ELE asteroid - and the likelihood of an ELE asteroid is actually higher for Mars as it does not have a stable barrier atmosphere as good as Earth's - meteorites are more frequent as a result.
So best case scenario is that we have a group of people who put 75% of their time into just surviving because there is no atmosphere or biome to support them. On top of that these people have the same biological makeup - including cognitive limits, biases etc...as the rest of us on earth so even if they sorted everything out, tribalism and the rest of our hardwired heuristics would just make them behave like the rest of us.
The better approach is to start engineering our faults out using data to make us better, more resilient processors of information and discovery. Improve humanity and everything is easier.
The technical challenges on Mars will probably only compound the political problems. Double plus fun.
The first people who landed on the Galapagos islands were also pretty excited about it. Once they realized that there is no fresh water there, they got the hell out.
Ideally, before the cold death of the universe, I want to transition my body into a higher dimensional body. So I'm entirely in support of your argument.
However, digitizing our brains, or any other transition away from the status quo right now is not only not currently possible, it is currently unimaginable. There have been no prototypes, no significant research, not even any real theories on how to accomplish such a task. Even repairing/repurposing parts of our current bodies is a giant challenge. Hell, we can't even appropriately map our biology or understand how they actually work.
Transitioning away from biology will take time. However, until that day, we need to stay alive and we need more resources. Becoming multi-planetary is just one "safe"(predictable) step towards the future you would prefer.
I know that's what I'm doing.
At a "smaller" scale,
- Previously, our rivers have dried, and our crops turned to dust.
- Our planet will eventually run out of resources.
- Our solar system will eventually get consumed by the sun.
- Our galaxy will eventually shrink into its central singularity.
Whenever we come across a resource time bomb, the final option has always been and will always been to migrate away. The only question has been, "where should we go?".
But aren't there potentially:
- infinite parallel universes?
- infinite higher dimensions?
- infinite recursive simulations?
However, infinite sounds like a lot, and maybe there are only a finite number of each of the above, but I don't think it'll matter. We can't keep beating time. Eventually the entropy time bomb will go off before we are able to solve its riddle. The only thing I want, is that before that day comes, I want to have beaten it a few times. Shown entropy who its master is. Because on that day, I want to be happy for my long time advisory and proud to have been the master of time, even if the student finally surpassed the master and has gotten its long deserved win.
That's why I brought up the accelerating rate of expansion of space ... everything will be moving away from us so quickly that eventually we'll run out of places to migrate to.
There is no point in arguing which one is easier. Feasibility and difficulty shouldn't be reasons for discarding long term efforts. Many current ideas were seen as impossible or extremely difficult.
Lets focus on that, since without those factors a billion years will just find the raccoons or squid that replaced us facing the same problem.
We'll be fine.
Owning one stock that has previously grown at 10% yoy is the same as owning ten stocks which have previously grown at 10% yoy right?
The cost of buying a stock is generally same between assets (within one or two stdv). Using your example it's crazy expensive just to "buy the stock." So its not really an option.
So, the advantage is that you build a completely separate civilization that is relatively immune to all these problems.
I would imagine that, after reaching the point of self-support, Mars inhabitants would focus more on securing their own existence, such as building underground.
Ditto for saying we haven't seen anything special out there, considering that we've barely even started looking (and every time someone proposes looking, a whole bunch of boring people show up to go, "why bother?").
A massive ELE asteroid is capable of doing enough traumatic damage to civilizations on Earth to entirely reset hundreds of years of technological development on this planet. Having another technologically-advanced civilization on another world just makes sense from a species survival perspective. And an ELE asteroid isn't even the most plausible traumatic human disaster we can imagine on Earth; war, politics, disease are all far more plausible.
It seems you also need a reminder that so much of the technological advancements we're enjoying now were developed, at least in some part, by a country that started out as an unexplored frontier (and, I'm sure there were people in 1450 that would have insisted Spain solve its own problems first before sending ships out to find a new route around the world). We have no way of predicting what kind of technology (environmental? energy?) or politics will be developed on a new world so isolated from Earth and populated by, presumably, many of the best and brightest from Earth.
Recontextualizing 21st century issues is key to us actually solving them, but that means we do in fact need to do things which has emotional impact on large populations. The moon-landings captured the imagination of, conservatively, half the planet, if only briefly. Mars-landings are likely to be similar. And an ongoing Martian colonization would be another one.
A Martian colonization effort is kind of interesting in this regard: because once you send enough people (and ideally, bring enough of them back as well) then 6 degrees of separation starts to take hold if they're distributed within the population. Start building up the quorum of people who've been, have gone, are there now and suddenly that context is leaking back into your general population. People know people who know a returned Martian colonizer. Projects and processes are compared to "this works on Mars, it'll work here" in the same way that everyone on this site who doesn't work at Google probably has said something like "well Google do ...".
One of his points is the effect that space exploration has on kids. It excites them. It makes them want to be explorers too. Kids are full of imagination, they hear about people on another world and they imagine themselves doing it too. It happened with the moon landings, and it inspired kids to become scientists and technologists and to follow their own paths to exploration.
edit: despite being born too late to be mesmerized by the moon landings in real-time, I was one of those kids. I started playing with computers and writing my first programs when I was 8. I watched a lot of Star Trek and James Doohan's Scotty was my favorite character. There was a picture of Neil Armstrong on my wall. I got "Odyssey" magazines and had a book that artistically imagined what life might be like elsewhere in the solar system that I read until, literally, the cover fell off. I had an audio cassette that took you on a wild ride through the solar system.
The hope of exploring space someday is what drew me into technology.
So many years later, and I only use that technology to have arguments with other people over whether exploration is "worth it" at all. How's that for some weltschmerz?
We're really not close to being a "multiplanetary species", and the major bottlenecks have nothing to do with the rockets to get us out there. A lot of smart people are aware of just how much trouble our species is in over the next century or so, and there's an element of understandable misery and panic. That really is no excuse however for cheering and weeping with joy when the guy selling the rockets points to the stars and says, "Humanity's future!"
Why not? Just because he's selling something doesn't mean his actions aren't useful.
They're not? If getting stuff from Earth's surface to low earth orbit and beyond weren't prohibitively expensive, we'd be doing a lot more of it.
Sure, there are many other technical (and some social and political) challenges inherent in sending people to Mars but if we don't solve the launch cost problem it'll be difficult to make rapid progress on the other problems that would suddenly become more pressing if launch costs weren't an issue.