At some point, all of the ‘non-expansionary’ attitudes will be evolutionary dead ends.
See: Luddites, those against exploring the New World, etc.
See: Luddites, those against exploring the New World, etc.
In contrast, what we know from facts about space travel: even real sea monsters might leave you alone once in a while, but space is actively trying to kill you at every moment. There are real problems to be solved, like rocket equation, radiation, having enough bandwidth once you get there to stream Netflix. The monsters out there are quite real and quite deadly.
Luddites were just worried about job security.
Did you know that the sea is still deadly? Not all of these are fatalities, but some are: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_shipwrecks_in_2018
Even once people began to realize that it somehow really worked, the benefit was attributed to the acid somehow interacting with the disease and not to vitamin deficiency. It's interesting how we, now the benefit of hindsight, can take things that took hundreds of years and literally millions of deaths to discover as being practically self evident.
As has been said before by others: I'll believe we're ready to colonize Mars or space after we've colonized the Sahara Desert, Antarctica, and the bottom of the ocean - all of which are vastly easier.
Yes, many of the real problems were solved by 1490 AD, but some were not. Longitude, for example, was insanely difficult.
Many, many people have died at sea. Well-trained, prepared and determined people.
Come to think, it's also odd to pose "not exploring the New World" as an existential threat to human progress, given that there were plenty of humans already there.