All of these articles and ways of thinking always miss the bigger, more fundamental shift in human society — we now know there is literally no place we can access in any meaningful amount of time where the “grass is greener” than the places we’ve already been.

This is profound, semi-depressing, and enlightening at the same time. Rather than seeking something new somewhere else, our new obsession is in improving what we’ve got, where we are right now.

I know a lot of you are going to make hand-wavy claims about space mining and things like that, but our population curve seems to indicate a very minimal benefit to all of that. If anything, the fastest-growing environmental concern seems to be space and sky pollution. Starry-eyed young engineers have been sold on the idea of interstellar space travel, when the reality of the commercial application of their work is that it’s more likely to lead to an over-proliferation of satellites and help rich people get to places faster via space plane.

The final argument someone’s inevitably going to make is, survival of the race. Yeah, okay. You might want to self-reflect on our existence as deeply terrestrial beings that are intrinsically connected to the Earth. Even if you spend all of your day hidden in a bedroom, you can’t escape your bond with this planet. Instead of trying to find a mistress in the form of another moon/planet, we need to spend more time working on the marriage.

I think space technologies are fun, and that rich people obsessed with suicide missions to other planets should be able to do what they want, but let’s not kid ourselves on the moral superiority of these sorts of things. There is no shame, and no inferiority, in working to optimize our Earth-bound existence.