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Comment by nfoz | Hacker News Reader

This will sound weird, but I have no idea why anyone cares about the abstract "survival of human species". I care very deeply about the lives of people actually living here right now. But if Earth is wiped out, what does it matter that some humans are alive somewhere? Except of course that I'm glad for them that they didn't get killed. But we're talking about generations from now anyway, and there are more direct ways to stop people from dying here today.

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There is the more generic idea of leaving a track in history, making sure one's offspring survives. If one of my descendants make it off-planet and thrives there once the Zombies attack/the meteor strikes/the nukes go off then my line will continue. I have no logic explanation for wanting to continue my bloodline, but I guess it's just a natural instinct.

The second reason to get off-world is the more far-fetched one, but assuming we can establish that other worlds are dead or sterile then we are free to customize it as we please without having to feel bad about it. In the long run we could leave Earth completely, allowing whomever comes next to develop freely without our intervention.

Because our code must live on.

Because it's not the end? I think we strive to continue on into the unknown.

Because we are all genetically related, and humans, like most or all organisms, care about their genetic code surviving.

It may be not obvious (yet it should be if you think about it), but humans, in a very essential way, are not like most all organisms, and "genetic code surviving" is not our primary concern.

Because it’s mostly a lie people tell themselves, similar to ‘I’m sure I am a good person’. How are you so sure?

There’s a lot of evidence that points to the fact that on a global scale, we can barely care about stuff geographically adjacent to us, or worse, socially (class) adjacent to us, but here we are claiming we care about generations beyond us.

Big old lie.

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