| Heh, an interesting one, though!
It's interesting how you rationalise the decision to go off-world, and they are certainly valid concerns.
To myself, I simply observe that whenever humanity faces frontiers, it seeks to conqeur them - make them humanly habitable.
I guess in space terms were still somewhere around the Lewis and Clark stage - but going off-world seems to be a simple inevitability.
Very possibly, the very drive to simply "expand" out is indeed an unconcscious rationalisation - of reducing the risk to any local group population - that is driven by Dawkin's famous "selfish-gene" concept from socio-biology.
Certainly there's plenty of room for conscious speculation, though. Whenever I think of space exploration, it always seems to resolve to the single issue of survival of the species. |