Too sad. Imo the only garbage in the world is plastic (and other man made, use once materials). It's time we stop treat food waste and human waste as garbage, they are manure and treat plastics separately like we treat heavy metals.
Why don't we spend our time, money and effort to fix the plastic problem asap instead of trying to settle in mars is beyond my imagination. May be it's not as cool a problem to solve.
The plastic waste researchers may not be inclined to solving problems of space propulsion. Likewise, rocket scientists won't be pushing the field of plastic microbe decomposition or whatever. Luckily there are some of each here on the earth at the moment.
Not when nationalism is king, and "make <whatever> great again" is the priority. That tends to lead to focusing on one thing, and doing it very terribly.
I don't think even the worst nationalists only focus one one thing. But to be honest, I'd be okay with ignoring plastic for another decade if we'd make settling Mars the only topic anybody is allowed to work on.
I've always wondered how society would've developed if there were multiple species that were as intelligent (or close to) as homo sapiens, like if Neanderthals didn't go extinct.
Unfortunately, I think that they would've either been wiped out via genocide or used as slaves, given how willing we are to do that to fellow humans.
Neanderthals are the same species, Homo, hence why they could crossbreed with early homo-sapiens. If they were still around today, we'd probably see them as just another race. They didn't look too different:
Oh I've definitely toyed with the fantasy of dolphin or octopus evolving in near parallel with humanity to the point of advanced technology (or having evolved to the point where they saw the innate flaws in advanced technology as inferior to an improved understanding of their innate biology and instead developed philosophically or spiritually, if you will).
Maybe the "habitual" is the diferentiator? I am not really sure what does the word mean in this context and how it would differentiate from non-habitual use.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8navgU8-tw0&t=126s