I'm torn on it. can you steelman the argument for it?
Discussion
Everyone knows Musk's argument for making humanity more resilient to disaster my dispersing it, so I won't harp on that.
Here's another case: As individuals, we grow in virtue and find fulfillment by setting ourselves great challenges and striving to achieve them. What better challenge could we choose than colonizing another world?
There are always pros and cons, practically, but perhaps the adventure of it is good for us, culturally.
i think that more realistic would be people moving out into the country and trying to live in places that are very hard to access
stuff that requires epic work buidling foot tracks across the edges of mountains and suchlike, and building beautiful things up there... like some of the more spectacular monasteries in the balkans
My steelman is that I love people, all life really, but people are especially awesome.
Let's take a detour to discuss nostr. Nostr can only exist because some small fraction of the population is interested in freedom tech, but 8 billion people is enough that even that small fraction can have a community. Now extrapolate to even more niche interests you have. I am sure some haven't met critical mass yet. Imagine having enough humans that even your most arcane hobby was a large thriving community where people could make a living suppling quality content. We don't want billions of humans, we want Trillions.
This dovetails nicely with my faith. I am a Catholic. I believe in cooperating with nature to fill the earth with life. I have six children as a result. I don't believe earth is near carrying capacity for humans. More people = more solutions.
But if we aren't over-populated now, with enough Catholics doing Catholic things we will be at some point. So in a way I guess you could say that the logical conclusion to any faith, that makes cooperating a with nature a moral imperative, is that moving out to the stars is also a moral imperative.
The thing is that version on the future is awesome. Humans aren't going to go alone and strew candy wrappers everywhere, we are going to bring our plants and pets. We are going to bring panda bears and bald eagles. Everything that was on a track for extinction with the swelling sun will instead fill the universe with color, stories, and love. And that is what I want, a universe brimming with love.
It's a nice idea and as an atheist I am also 100% for space exploration and colonization, because I think that's simply the drive behind all life forms.
Your comments/rationale about humans "bringing with us our plants and pets" and somehow filling the universe with our planet-bound companion species, though, I don't share. As an ideal yeah, it'd be cool. As a plausible outcome, I don't think so.
There's this principle that says that the most variety is always found at the point of origin. Even if we actively and consciously carry other species with us, it will necessarily be an absurdly tiny fraction of the total set, completely non-representative of Earth, and most likely based one purely utilitarian reasons.
As a matter of fact, I even think we will not carry ourselves (as in, Homo sapiens) away. It will be our non-biological descendants who will physically leave the gravity well. Our physical bodies are bound to it (unless we somehow manage to skip/turboaccelerate millions of years of evolution through conscious gene manipulation).
Hear hear!!!!
there is a point at which a civilizaition is so far away that we don't benefit from any exchange with them. what good is it if there is thriving community 100 million light years away that we'll never interact with?
Short term benefit does tail off with distance but long term prospects improve. It is all about how many trials you can run. Places that are too remote for data exchange in a lifetime can run some uncontaminated trials. The best ideas will spread through whatever slow channels exist.
With 10,000 stars you can fit plenty of humanity within 100 light-years, 100 million light-years encompasses over a thousand galaxies.