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These are bad comparisons. There are too many people on Earth now for us to acquire all our resources here without a large environmental cost, which even witho
by magduf 7y ago
These are bad comparisons. There are too many people on Earth now for us to acquire all our resources here without a large environmental cost, which even without a killer asteroid is going to bite us in the ass. There's endless resources in space, so logically we should be building the technology and capability to go there and harvest them. A by-product of that is also being able to live there and have an insurance policy just in case there's a planet-ending disaster.
In short, planet-ending disasters are not the only reason to develop these capabilities, and it's shortsighted and stupid to continue to destroy our environment here without taking advantage of all the resources and opportunities outside our gravity well.
- vkou 7y agoThe economic cost of extracting Earth resources + environmental restoration/remediation is many orders of magnitude lower then the cost of extracting space resources, and will remain many orders of magnitude lower for any realistic projections of the future. If we cared about this sort of thing, we would be doing it now, as opposed to sitting on our hands, waiting for magical space unicorns to be invented.