The New World was a bleak dystopia for a few hundred years. Preserving the Earth is a better option than colonising other planets, although less sexy.
That's a bit of an overstatement. I expect if that were true, people wouldn't have kept on coming.
After reading few books from the period and later ones by Nathaniel Hawthorne, I don't think so.
> I expect if that were true, people wouldn't have kept on coming.
The people coming could have incomplete or incorrect information. Communication was slow back then. Separating fact from falsehoods about the New World would have been a crapshoot at best.
Even an entirely country got it wrong. Scotland bankrupted itself on the Darien scheme.
That’s of course ignoring the post apocalyptic lives of the natives that survived successive waves of disease and collapse radiating out from points of contact, but it’s habit at this point.
Orbital habitats, formed by disassembling the moon, on the other hand, can give us vastly more habitable area than available on Earth, and the environment can be engineered to be better than Earth ever was.
Recently I’ve become convo bed that other planets don’t have much of a role to play in our future except as a source of raw materials.
Space exploration is more like Amazon spending $100B to build a hut with 10 Arduinos on the summit of Mt. Everest.