Well, sure. But they had to hurry up and live in space. Sticking with spec-fiction, wouldn't it be preferable to start work on this sort of thing before the m

Well, sure. But they had to hurry up and live in space. Sticking with spec-fiction, wouldn't it be preferable to start work on this sort of thing before the moon explodes (or some more likely scenario makes the Earth uninhabitable by humans)? I understand the reasoning against this line of thought and I'm well aware that "not putting all eggs in one basket" is a common motivation for investing in off-earth colonization. That said, I took Seveneves to be a fun, occasionally tedious story of how crappy it would be even if we did everything "right" on short notice. Starting the process before we have a deadline would theoretically help to avoid the crunch that led to much of the issues in that novel.