We stay on this rock, we die on this rock. Confining ourselves to Earth isn't a survival strategy, it's giving up. Rebuttals would be appreciated, though!
Once we have figured out how to achieve homeostasis on a planet so plentiful in resources as our own, then we could start looking to do so elsewhere in less favorable environments.
Mars is extremely barren and has negligible capabilities for life support.
The biggest issue I can think of is oil running out, but we're on a good trajectory to solving that. Other resources seem either abundant or replaceable. The threat of global nuclear war is problematic but not really solvable by throwing more people at the problem. Overpopulation isn't projected to be a problem. Climate change will be a major inconvenience and costly, but unlikely to be an existential issue.
Of course there's lots of injustice, hunger, disease, murder and torture that would be nice to resolve, but it's not an existential issue for humanity.
I don't think we have any issues like that as a species, as a species we are pretty much thriving. That growth might not be built on the most sustainable principles, but we are slowly getting there.
Short of something super apocalyptic ruining the whole planet for most life (like a big asteroid hitting us), I don't see humanity eradicating itself completely anytime soon, we are quite a sturdy bunch.
> Once we have figured out how to achieve homeostasis on a planet so plentiful in resources as our own
We've had plenty enough time trying to do that, maybe it's time to try a different exercise with more constraints to motivate creativity? Mars could be exactly that.
Despite what you hear about electric cars and so on, every year the human race increases the amount of environmental damage it does compared to the year previous. We're not just increasing the damage; we're increasing the rate of increase of the damage. Heck, not just the first and second but also the third derivatives are all positive.
So in fact we're not getting to sustainability at all; we're moving away from it faster each year. We're accelerating into the apocalypse. Some day that might change, but not this year. First we'd have to stop accelerating. Then we've have to slow down. Then we'd have to start reversing.
Between environmental disaster and global warming that could wipe a huge part of humanity, the ever present possibility of a nuclear war, tolerance to antibiotics, and other such niceties, I can't even begin to see how would one think that...
That's the point there: We can easily wipe out huge parts of humanity. Huge parts yes, but the whole species? I don't think that's gonna happen unless something of a truly apocalyptic scale happens, and as ingenious we are, I doubt we are that ingenious to make that happen any time soon.
Note: I'm not saying everything will be just fine, I'm just saying we are a rather resilient species as we don't need actually that much just to "survive".
There are ~15,000 nuclear weapons deployed right now by 9 nation states. That's enough to wipe out almost all of the world population, and I'm not convinced the few that remain would survive in the food scarce, irradiated lands for long.
So yeah, I'd rather just focus on developing survival strategies for our rock. But the whole discussion is maybe a bit off topic here too.
So, we have devised a system that directs our considerable resources (human, natural, and otherwise) almost exclusively per financial incentives and, oddly, there seems to little financial incentive in ensuring our own collective survival.
If we don't evolve in our thinking, we'll just reproduce the same problems wherever we go.
I expect we won't evolve our thinking, but if we could somehow reproduce the same problems wherever we go enough times, there's an opportunity for evolution and natural selection to operate on our societies at a galactic level. We'd buy ourselves the chance to roll the dice many, many, many more times. There will be misery and suffering along the way, sure, but that's been the cost of our existence thus far.
That strikes me as circular? I mean, are you saying that the planet was never fit to begin with because it is unable to withstand any assault we can muster and remain habitable for us?
We've evolved the capacity to split the atom, while being simultaneously limited by our own biology. We need air. We need water. Yet, we can easily create a blanket of fallout that will render virtually any environ inhospitable to our delicate biologies. We can't ignore that incongruence and think that our planet is the problem.
Wherever we go will require some stewardship.
>defending our crapsack position from asteroids is as good as it gets.
LOL. Well, given our difficulty in finding any other place that offers a baseline of accommodation for any life, I'd say it'd be even more difficult to find a place that works for us and is also immune to cosmic activity. So, we'd likely have to consider certain issues for any crapsack of a planet we populate.
It's kind of like saying, "we don't have the technology or will to ensure our survival on a customized-for-us planet, so let's go out and terraform another planet or achieve interstellar travel, and then figure out how to ensure our survival on that planet".
How's about we optimize on the stewardship-front here at home?
>if we could somehow reproduce the same problems wherever we go enough times there's an opportunity for evolution
More likely, extinction.
Take a hypothetical epidemic that wipes as all out, and that we could have prevented if only we gave money to more biological/medical research instead of space exploration.