Even if we can surmount all the different challenges we face, even if we could colonise space, should we? Izzie Clarke left Adrian Currie, from the Cambridge University's Centre for the Study of Existential Risk with the last word.
Adrian - One answer to the question is “Sure why not, that sounds really fun!” But there's another way of thinking about that question which is something like Why are we leaving the planet? If we have a system of society that's extremely unsustainable and tends to break planets. For instance you know one that pollutes a lot. One that tends to over extract resources that kind of society moving to another planet isn't really going to solve anything. It's simply going to, we're going to bring the same mistakes with us. The idea that this heroic Moonshot effort to colonize other planets is somehow a solution to a lot of the problems that we have. It's got the same problem as all technological solutions to the problems that we have. If you don't solve the social practices if you don't solve the ways of life that we have that are unsustainable a technological fix is just going to be a band aid.
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