You should care about "theoretical" future death because, via the inexorable passage of time, the future becomes the present. At which time you have "actual" death happening all around you.
Let's try and stop catastrophic climate change, diabetes, and traffic/pollution related deaths, and also allow some people to worry about nuclear holocaust as well.
I was playing a lot of Kerbal Space Program and wanted to use those UI concepts to explore real missions and orbital maneuvers. I was particularly interested in the Cassini trajectory. But I started the project before discovering Eyes on the Solar System, which is awesome and now I find I'm kind of robbed of my motivation.
New Horizons was launched directly into a solar escape trajectory.
It's going slower than Earth but that is no indication of how advanced the technology is. The whole goal was to get a close encounter with Pluto-Charon. What's the point in flying off into nothingness any faster after that?
You can't eat housing. Yes instead of basic income or our current social services we could just build a lot of homes.
But why would you even build homes in the first place. Do you think Salt Lake City in 2005 with 2000+ chronically homeless people didn't have at least 2000 homes on the market?
If you have better schools the district's property values go up which increases the tax base. Families can and do move across districts to access better schools, so there is competition in that sense. Same with many city services. Firefighters and teachers in Palo Alto for instance are paid well compared to other districts, the schools are some of the "best" in the nation, and property values are high as hell.
The odds of a medium sized impact in the next few thousand years are very small. Still, an advanced asteroid defense capability should be prepared, since even the small-ish bolides that we expect to hit with greater frequency should be eliminated. This should reduce the risk from catastrophic impactors even further.
Settlement of e.g. Mars will never be needed in the time frames we should be thinking about. If asteroid defense is developed, then for thousands of years that will not be a concern at all. And if in 2,000 years they need a settlement on Mars, the people in 1,800 years can prioritize doing it.
In other words I don't see it as a priority. Material conditions on Earth are not great, and we are threatened by catastrophes in the atmosphere, oceans, and tectonic plates. Earth and its cities are infinitely more responsive to our efforts and investment than Mars or elsewhere. There is so much that we can do here in this century, while settling another planetary body in this century seems basically impossible.
People would not go to Mars because they need to. They will go because they want to. We always were an exploring types.
I may not happen within this century, maybe even not this millennium. But I believe it will happen. And for the time being it would be great adventure just to try and make the Mars more friendly.
I like the base rate fallacy committed there.
In recent history, there have been at least 5 sizable asteroid impacts, each of which would evaporate a big city. Just lucky those didn't hit any. In longer term, two of those triggered mass extinctions.
If a "evaporate a big city" or "kill all humans on Earth" asteroid strikes, the existence of a Mars colony doesn't help my personal survival or well-being in any way whatsoever unless I'm there.
And if I'm there, odds are that it made my personal survival chances worse, since they're mostly determined by the many "normal" causes of death and being a pioneer in a world not really suited for humans is likely to be worse than Earth.
You could make an argument that it's not wise to put all your eggs in one basket, and it has some merit in this discussion, but when all I have is one egg, the only thing I can do is to pick the safest basket I have - and for now it's Earth.
Can you elaborate? I do say that we should develop the asteroid defense capability, to eliminate those smaller more frequent impacts and others. My terminology was not standard or precise and I apologize for that. I mean by "small" those which are akin to an atom bomb or a hydrogen bomb explosion, and "medium" those which would cause catastrophe over a large region but not global annihilation.
It's a strange idea that progress was arrested by anti-war, civil rights, feminist, and environmental activist movements, while epitomized by men walking on the moon. The counter-cultural movement of the 60s was not anti-science it was anti-exploitation and anti-hegemony.
Human spaceflight only coincides with "progress" in as much as it improves material conditions on Earth. That is what we think of as progress. Technological progress must be recognized as distinct from technological advance.
A flat rate could cover software fees and advertising. Dispute resolution should maybe be insured for each and every ride, but at nothing close to the ~20% cut currently taken.
It's not about whether the achievement is groundbreaking in a technological sense, but whether this is a reasonable, defensible, sane, or even merely legal, program.
Let's try and stop catastrophic climate change, diabetes, and traffic/pollution related deaths, and also allow some people to worry about nuclear holocaust as well.