> We don't need to be able to launch 1000 Starships/year to protect the Earth from asteroids. And we definitely don't need to reuse them, it's not like we have

> We don't need to be able to launch 1000 Starships/year to protect the Earth from asteroids. And we definitely don't need to reuse them, it's not like we have to handle an asteroid threat every day. NASA's asteroid redirection test[0] was launched from a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. Largely I think it's important to build up and maintain skills/knowledge/capabilities. Specific mission outcomes (dog in space, man on moon, car in orbit) are markers of our increasing progress, not the sole capability we gained. > I guess what you mean is humans and the few animal/plant species they believe are enough for their convenience. Initially, for the scenario where Earth is wiped out by an asteroid/etc., it'd be nice to have a last hope to maintain life - given it's potentially the only life in the whole of existence. Intelligent life if possible, but some hardy microbes if not. > At the moment humans are destroying themselves in the short term. Thinking about long-long term on the moon/mars seems like putting your best effort into fixing your fridge while the rest of the house is on fire and saying "how will we do without a fridge?" I'd claim if we paused all exploratory science (due to lack of immediately obvious applications) until all danger was gone, we'd still be in mud huts. It can be hard to prioritize long-term issues, but I think it needs doing to avoid one short-term problem being endlessly replaced by another. > It would probably be easier to survive an asteroid in bunkers on Earth than surviving on mars, so we may as well do that. We do have bunkers, and I'd agree we should have more. Surviving on Earth would almost always be first choice (ideally by deflecting the meteor). > I keep repeating that because it seems unclear: there are no reachable planets outside our solar system. The next star is already so far that we just can't reach it, period. I'm not betting on us hopping over a solar system to escape any current short-term problem, but I do hope we're still around in millions/billion of years - at which point travelling 4 lightyears to Alpha Centauri does not seem an impossibility. [0]: https://science.nasa.gov/planetary-defense-dart/ https://science.nasa.gov/planetary-defense-dart/