"Humans" is a huge and ultimately quaint assumption in some of these discussions. Any such expansion to other planets will be happening in the same time frame t

"Humans" is a huge and ultimately quaint assumption in some of these discussions. Any such expansion to other planets will be happening in the same time frame that we get robots or embodied artificial intelligence, whatever you want to call it, with capabilities on par with and then beyond humans. In the context of interplanetary expansion, there are not a lot of reasons that these future organisms need to be restricted to living only in human-friendly environments. I'm all for efforts to expand human life to other viable places, but also it's time to enlarge the discussion.