[Finner]

Originally Posted by peter12

The premise for extraplanetary settlements is a bit funny to me. So we trash Earth, and then what, move on to Mars and trash it?

A good (very very long)article - SpaceX and Elon Musk related. Page 2 has information about the importance of "backing up" the human race.

At the rate humankind is progressing it is extremely important that we look beyond our planet. In the next 100 years we will see an even bigger explosion in technology, artificial intelligence, etc.


http://waitbutwhy.com/2015/08/how-an...ize-mars.html/

Species extinctions are kind of like human deaths—they’re happening constantly, at a mild and steady rate. But a mass extinction event is, for species, like a war or a sweeping epidemic is for humans—an unusual event that kills off a large chunk of the population in one blow. Humans have never experienced a mass extinction event, and if one happened, there’s a reasonable chance it would end the human race—either because the event itself would kill us (like a collision with a large enough asteroid), or the effects of an event would (like something that decimates the food supply or dramatically changes the temperature or atmospheric composition).

There are other signs pointing to this being an extraordinarily unusual time to be alive:

• For 99.8% of human history, the world population was under 1 billion people. In the last .2% of that history, it has crossed the 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and 7 billion marks.
• Up until 25 years ago, there had never been such a thing as a global brain of godlike information access and connectivity on this planet. Today we have the internet.
• After barely using any energy for the first 99,800 years of human history, in the last 200 we’ve suddenly thrust ourselves into the Fossil Fuels Era, blowing through a huge chunk of stored underground carbon energy, without fully understanding the implications of doing so.
• Humans walked around or rode horses for 999 of the last 1,000 centuries. In this century, we drive cars, fly planes, and land on the moon.
• If extra-terrestrial life were looking for other life in the universe, it would be dramatically easier to find us this century than in any century before, as we project millions of signals out into space.
• With an average of one mass extinction event every 100 million years since animals have been around, we may be currently engineering a sixth one by accident.

If we take a step back and just look at the situation, it should be clear that nothing that’s happening right now is normal. Current humans have FAR more power than any life on Earth ever has, and it seems very likely that if in a billion years, an alien history major writes a term paper on the history of life on Earth, the time we’re living in right now—however it turns out—will be a major part of that paper.

This guy has a ton of good articles on solar power, the fermi paradox, artificial intelligence, etc.