> There is enough time to think about colonizing the stars after that.
I didn't read it as indicating that we should fully postpone humanity's problems. For example, the next few sentences read:
> The world isn't going to end because his next launch is a month late due to pesky safety regulations or whatever else. This effort is going to play out over many generations and centuries.
That indicates to me that the delay the person is considering is on the order of the delay imposed by FCC regulations (i.e. months or years), not "start working on it after we've solved humanity's problems".
Those comments were added after I responded. In fact it's still being edited. This was the entirety of the comment I responded to:
> The single most important job for humanity right now is to save this one planet we have from destruction. There is enough time to think about colonizing the stars after that.
The nation with the largest amount of military force and nuclear weapons, as well as control of the globally used & prized currency ($ USD), and even the universal language of the skies (well, maybe you could say it's England's language, but the central power of the U.S. is the reason it's the language of the skies), has around 1/3rd of it's nation that actively would like to see at least an other 1/3 of it's nation die, and said other 1/3 really only wants to get things like nationwide enforcement of basic human rights (like in all other, I think, 32 of 33 highly developed nations do), and to actually embody the meaning of "welfare state" that the U.S. has been defined as for... idk how long tbh, but for quite some time - Along with a want for the aforementioned 1/3rd not wanting to literally kill them.
And they're simply unable to come to any understanding, after decades of botched discourse.
I don't see how some group of people focusing on space travel as a way to potentially divert the end of humanity as something that bad
Good point, I should have restrained myself here.
The rest of your comments would be fair, except that u/paxys said the following:
> There is enough time to think about colonizing the stars after that.
Which clearly indicates that we should not be working on space travel until AFTER we've solved humanity's problems.