I strongly agree with the sentiment here, but a few things: > Meanwhile other people are working on getting to orbit, so as to provide infinite room In additi

I strongly agree with the sentiment here, but a few things: > Meanwhile other people are working on getting to orbit, so as to provide infinite room In addition to orbit, there's Antartica (it's certainly not colder than Mars, with more plentiful water ice and oxygen), oceans (desalinization + sea based habitats), not to mention very sparsely populated parts of the US just a few hours drive away from Bay Area. By all means, let's go to orbit, explore colonize the solar system, and at the very least send probes[] to the stars. One other side effect of tremendous growth in energy production: we can use that energy to do things we've never thought powerful, such as accelerate a probe to ~5% of c, allowing a probe to reach the Alpha Centauri system within the lifetime of someone born today... > "In the year 200 AD, there were approximately 180million human beings on the planet Earth. And at that time a Christian philosopher called Tertullian argued: ‘We are burdensome to the world, the resources are scarcely adequate for us… already nature does not sustain us.’" Imagine if the population did stay at ~200mm through the time period. _What_ tremendous advances would we have missed out on had the extra billions of people not been born?