But I'm unsure about the morality of it. I think the drive to expand and discover new things is perhaps a direct cause of the deeper problems we have on Earth. Would humanity be better off just becoming a sustainable population of monks? Or are we morally equivalent to a virus, reduced to survival of the fittest and always seeking out the next host to reap?
But even if we go farm out every other planet and make it barren and even if we mined every ounce of every other planet in our galaxy... if we're the only life in the area, or the only life in the universe, it doesn't matter one bit. We could blow up every single other planet and it wouldn't hurt us at all, because we can't live there.
So the only thing that makes sense is to keep living like we are the only life in the universe, all the while trying to figure out if that's true or not. Mars isn't alive. Venus isn't alive. The moon isn't alive. It's not "reaping" a "host" any more than me painting the walls of my house is. It doesn't make one lick of difference. There's nothing immoral about spreading to other lifeless planets.
uh...we aren't.
And if you only mean conscious life, (1) I'm not sure why that is a special consideration, but I am familiar with the discussions around this point; (2) it is more than possible that certain animals, like other primates, dolphins, whales, etc., have some degree of conscious experience, and it is also more than possible that we won't find anything more obvious than that on another planet.
Edit: Ah, I see. You were saying there is no life in space. I was thinking more along the lines of, "what about all the environmental damage we will do in order to travel to outer space." I just didn't realize that I should have included that concern in my initial comment, since for some reason I thought it would be obvious.
Sure we may cause environmental damage to get there, but I think that is far outweighed by the benefit of being a multi-planet species.
But we are in such a critical moment right now in terms of our ability to really destroy the ecology we depend on. It's like there a small fire started in the bathroom and some of us have chosen this moment to start planning a new vacation home.
For Elon Musk personally, he's so involved in the shift away from carbon through his work at Tesla that it feels like it balances out. He's a leader in fighting the fire and also spending half of his time on the new house. But in general I can't really commend the aerospace engineers working on problems like this when we are so close to being able to fix so many age old problems on Earth.
This is such a critical couple of decades for Earth technology.
Why not both? It's not too hard to see how in the long-term, Tesla and Solarcity's progress are relevant to the needs of living on Mars as well (ground vehicle propulsion, electric power generation and storage...)
It would be great to avoid, but moving people out of coastal cities certainly has a precedence, and there's plenty of land in Kansas, the Taiga, etc. Life would be tougher than today, but it's not an existential thread.
If waves lap up against my place in Queens, I'm not going to start killing my neighbors. I'm going to move to a Minnesota with better weather.
Would the Minnesotans be happy with that?