A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush. We have a viable planet that can sustain life right now. And if we take care of it, it can sustain life for a much longer time.
Also Mars is inhospitable to humans as well
Agreed. But unless we spread out, we could be dooming ourselves. Imagine hundreds of thousands of years ago. If early humans had stayed in a single valley, never venturing further, simply because that place had everything we needed, a single natural catastrophe could’ve wiped us out. The same logic applies here.
We have the resources, capabilities and collective willpower to spread ourselves among the stars. We’ve never had that kind of power, we should take it while we still have the chance. We can do two things at once.
Simple solution; reduce childbirth. Let the people who don’t want to have kids not have kids and the ones that want kids have them. However, that would involve giving proper reproductive health rights. Childbirth is already in decline, which is why many world leaders are panicking, but just because a politician is panicking doesn’t mean it’s wrong, but I digress…
For some reason, we as humans believe that the only solution for overpopulation is to cut losses and run when we have enough knowledge on what to do to reduce the degradation of the planet. But to too many people, the solution is to go start overpopulatinh other planets. It’s just rinse and repeat. If we can’t even get our shit together here, then what cosmic right do we have to go do it to another planet?
Reduce childbirth all you want (and I support it, we’ve massively overexpanded our population, far beyond what Earth can support sustainably) but that won’t help if we get annihilated by an asteroid, supervolcano or nuclear war.