There's so much to unpack here, I'd love to have a longer form discussion in a place where we won't run out of thread depth, but I can't dig into all of the points in this format.

This all gets very philosophical, but seriously, optimism is much better than pessimism here.

> There are awesome things on earth besides humans

Like what? Nature is cool, we shouldn't destroy it, but nothing else is truly sentient on this planet besides us. Nothing else on this planet can ponder and understand the world like we can, this is a good thing that the universe should have more of. A meteor (like the one that killed the dinosaurs) could hit this planet at any time, in fact it's pretty likely that it will happen again. And on a long enough timeline, the sun will die and ALL life and ALL nature will die. In the interim what should we do? Should we just sit around on this planet and wait it out trying to preserve things the way they were when humans first evolved? What's the point?

I prefer to take the humanist approach, I like to think that humans and intelligence will make an incredibly cool, adventure-filled future for the universe and that we can and will do great things with more people.