Before-and-after images show how Greenland's glaciers have rapidly retreated

SFO->CHC->SFO is about ~2000kg of CO2 per person[0], compared to the average American yearly emissions of 15,000 kg[1]

Rural folk emit about 20% more CO2[2] than city dwellers in the US, so if OP lives in a city, even flying to NZ and back once a year puts him at less climate impact than an average rural American.

[0] https://www.carbonindependent.org/22.html#:~:text=CO2%20emis....

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1049662/fossil-us-carbon....

[2]https://www.anthropocenemagazine.org/2020/02/the-unexpected-....

At the rate we're going it might be more something along the lines of 'If you can read this and your geologists uncovered buried cities then welcome, Aliens. And if we are your ancestors: by some miracle we seem to have survived'.

This is so stupid. Just use comics. Like the Aegyptians.

If you haven’t read the book Diaspora, you might enjoy it.

Mars might be just a first (easiest) step for becoming multi-planetary/spacefaring civilization. By itself it is not that special or important but if you have a colony on another planet you focus more on space technology and other options that it brings.

What do I get out of it? Happiness, of course. If my life was all about me and ny children, then it’d truly be meaningless.

Say we ran with your perspective. Mars doesn’t matter. Ok, that means it’s guaranteed that you, your children, and the descendants of everyone you know will die as our sun heats up. This is not so far away, as the video illustrates.

So then, what do you get out of this? A few dopamine hits and some nice chemical reactions before the eternal void? What’s all of our work even amount to?

We have the privilege of being the only life form ever to use technology. Technology! We can do things. Most life can’t do a damn thing. They live, briefly, and then die, gruesomely. And till the asteroid hit, that might have been the story of our planet until the sun gobbled it up. (Though imagining dinosaur astronauts is fun too.)

Would you say that asteroid is all about you and your children? It’s what even made it possible for you to be here, along with the unbroken string of cells from billions of years ago till the present day. Me and my children? We’re nothing, in that perspective. We are here thanks to everyone that came before.

And we owe it to those who come after to let them live an even better life. So unless you want the descendants of everyone you know to die horribly one day, colonizing space is our only way out.

But that’s just what I get out of it. After all, my own chemical reactions are unlikely to change a thing, over a single millisecond of that video. There’s nothing wrong with focusing on yourself and enjoying the ride. But personally, I end up a lot happier trying to make life be about more than little ol’ me. (My daughter says "gaaaa!" as I write this, which is either a salute of agreement or a firm rebuttal. Time will tell.)

The thing about Mars specifically (compared to the Moon) is that it represents a much larger commitment. Long term human presence on Mars isn’t something that’s as whim-friendly as the Moon is: you either plan for being there long term (including some level of self-sufficiency) or you don’t go. At the same time, it’s a goal that is probably within closer grasp than building freely-moving, permanently spaceborne crafts that are large and advanced enough for continuous, long-term human inhabitation.

With that in mind, many view human settlement of Mars as something as an insurance policy against decades-long periods of stagnancy like we saw from the late 70s up through the 2010s. It’ll apply strong pressure on the parties involved to continue to improve the technologies involved in getting out there and back and living there in ways that a human presence on the Moon won’t (you can’t get away with a lightly modernized rehash of the Apollo missions; that’s not good enough).

I agree. The main problem is that it’s impossible to reliably project out even decades let alone centuries or millennia. So longtermism gives you this blank slate to tell any “just so story” you want.

Speculating is fine but you can’t use pure speculation to justify things in the real world. That’s the problem.

Truth is that we have no idea about anything much past our own slice of time. In 2000 years we may be extinct, reverted to hunter gatherers, settled across the solar system like in The Expanse, or extinct or kept in zoos by superintelligent posthuman AIs that have expanded out into the cosmos. Or none of the above. Who knows.

Without any reference: that makes a lot of sense. We are essentially withdrawing stored sunshine from 100's of millions of years ago to re-use it today.

Most minerals can be re-extracted from our ruins; energy resources are irreplaceable, but mining former cities for steel and copper is likely to be easier than purifying them from ground deposits.