It's a moral hazard to hold out hope for a "home away from home". Terraforming Mars is a moonshot.
If we ever find ourselves in a situation where we cannot survive on a planet where food literally grows out of the ground, with abundant liquid water and atmospheric oxygen at 1 atm, how on Earth would we survive on a planet that is devoid of life, has no liquid water, an atmosphere that's 1% the pressure of Earth's with no atmospheric oxygen, and little to no sources of energy?
Again, the bottom of the ocean is far more habitable than Mars, even if we experienced a similar extinction event similar to the one we experienced 65 million years ago.
Earth is habitable now. There are plenty of plausible non-anthropogenic disasters that may make that so not so. Some typical examples include megavolcano eruption, coronal mass ejection, and asteroid impact. It would be good to not have all of our eggs in one basket here on Earth.
And it's for exactly the same reason of having redundancy that it would be a good thing for Earth to continue to remain habitable, i.e. we should stop ruining the planet through climate change.
It's not a moral hazard at all; the two outlooks are congruous.
> megavolcano eruption, coronal mass ejection, and asteroid impact.
Even after any of those events, the bottom of the ocean would still be more habitable than Mars.
> It's not a moral hazard at all; the two outlooks are congruous.
The moral hazard is that we'll begin to think of Mars as a backup, when it isn't one at all. The Earth is very likely to be the one shot we have at a home. If we can't manage to make Earth habitable in the face of catastrophe, there is little hope to make a cold, barren rock that's millions of miles away habitable.
What about impacts such as the one that created the moon? We can argue about likelihood of it happening again but large enough impacts can liquify even crust on the opposite side of the planet. The bottom of the ocean won’t help at that point right?
I mean, the likelihood is pretty important here. The likelihood of such a large impact was pretty high in the early solar system, and it was high for Mars, as well.
If we ever find ourselves in a situation where we cannot survive on a planet where food literally grows out of the ground, with abundant liquid water and atmospheric oxygen at 1 atm, how on Earth would we survive on a planet that is devoid of life, has no liquid water, an atmosphere that's 1% the pressure of Earth's with no atmospheric oxygen, and little to no sources of energy?
Again, the bottom of the ocean is far more habitable than Mars, even if we experienced a similar extinction event similar to the one we experienced 65 million years ago.