Gee, that last post got away form me. What happened to "try to be concise"?
I meant to say: I don;t really EXPECT we will colonize any extra-solar planet i the next few hundred years. But we might NEED to. So humans would have a place where they can maintain a civilization while the ecosystem crashes and destroys industrial civilization on the planet.
If we had self-sustaining space colonies, THEY would understand that you have to PROTECT the ecosystem you live in. Over centuries, the planetary ecosystem would recover and then we could re-populate the globe we were born on.
I used to hope that we would build space habitats from asteroidal resources before we turned this planet into a desert.
But we are already saying that it would be "too expensive" to convert coal plants or find alternatives to automotive gasoline. Let alone build space habitats!
As crop failures make us even poorer, we will be even less able to afford space exploration and colonization. So we will have to live with (or die with) the consequences of our current shortsightedness.
In the past, we only faced mild threats like animal predators, Ice Ages, plagues and natural droughts. Now we have a dangerous threat: our own species' greed and shortsightedness. That challenge is so far proving too great for us to overcome.
