Scott Solomon

Here's the thing, like if we're talking about truly living in space, like, you know, moving to another place to live, it assumes that human reproduction is possible.

And we actually don't know if that's the case.

So who's working on that?

They include commercial space companies like SpaceX and Blue Origin, but also governmental space agencies like NASA.

I mean, the current Artemis program that is attempting to return us to the moon has the long-term goal of getting to Mars and establishing a presence there.

The idea of being on the moon is basically like

a way to practice and learn for how we could eventually go and live on Mars.

Once it became clear to me that this was something that was actually in the works, I became really curious and really interested to understand, what do we actually know about what would happen if those efforts are successful?

Some see it as just a great adventure.

But then there's people that see the possibility for profit, right?

For mining asteroids and making money back home.

But to me, the most compelling reason that I've encountered and one that really resonates with me is the idea that

eventually, if we don't leave Earth, we will probably become extinct.

I mean, if you just look at the history of our planet and the history of life on Earth, you know, I'm an evolutionary biologist, so I think about life on these long timescales, and we know that there have been major catastrophes that have happened throughout the history of life on Earth.

The most recent

major disaster being the asteroid impact that killed the dinosaurs and about 75% of other species at the time, which was 66 million years ago.

Eventually, something like that is going to happen again.

We may or may not have the ability to see it coming and to take action to prevent it.

So the idea there is that if we don't expand into space, if we keep all our eggs in one planetary basket, so to speak, eventually our time will come.

Yeah, you're absolutely right.