Colonies in space, our future?

[auroraglacialis]

I used to be very fascinated with space travel and colonies. I can imagine that they would be possible and that they would be similar to the settlers coming from Europe to the US in 16th century.
However I think a couple of things make it a rather bad idea at the moment. One is that we actually have our hands full with keeping the planet alive we are living on - our home, our base of operations if you want to call it - the place we can always return to. I think definitely that has to be solved first, if humanity has learned how to keep the planet alive and still exist on it in some sort of peaceful coexistence with the natural world, then maybe we as a species are also ethically and morally evolved enough to go to other planets.

Otherwise I think the result would be all too much like Avatar - with private companies being the only ones powerful and rich enough to make it happen but wanting a revenue for that - with taking land from indigenous people as the Europeans did in America - with decimation of alien species, basically just continuing the story of human civilization on Earth. That would really be disastrous and I would in that case rather have humanity stuck on Earth, if they did not made that evolutionary step before leaving the solar system.

The other points are more practical - I think the challenges of space travel are huge - unexpected problems will arise, so it will take quite some time. If there are inhabitable planets out there the next question is if they already are teeming with life? And what to do then? Colonizing would most likely mean a deep cut into the indigenous ecosystems and eventuall it or the colony might be wiped out. If there is no indigenous life on it, the planet will not be inhabitable to Earth life either, because it is life itself that makes Earth habitable to life. It prevented Earth from turning into a Mars or Venus billions of years ago and kept the balance up to now. A planet in the habitable zone without life (which I think is unlikely as I believe life will develop really fast in the right conditions) would not have a breathable atmosphere, possibly no liquid water and so on. It would need some kind of (bio?)technology to change that. Same of course with Mars, though anything we can do to Mars is futile in the end because of the low gravity that cannot hold a proper atmosphere. So humans on Mars or the Moon would basically live in ground-based space stations. The question is what the benefit of that is.

The idea to ease population problems or to put industry in space makes no sense at all, because the effort to actually move billions of people into space and provide habitats for them there is incredible. More likely new colonies would have a growth in population themselves instead. Compare it to a field of dandelions - if you plow a field next to them to give new habitat, you can start digging them up and transplanting them, but more likely the seeds will colonize the field faster. And in respect of industry - if you can build factories that are self-containing enough to work in space (not wasting anything, recycling everything, not leaking anything etc), you can as well let them exist on Earth. Expections may be industry that requires zero-g.

So in summary - I think humanity first has to "evolve" in some way - become most-industrialized or post-civilized in some way and develop completely new ways at all levels before they should be space farers. We cannot have a competition/greed based economy, a lifestyle that is detrimental to the planets ecosystems, a society that opresses many of its members, a "winner takes it all" mentality, a mentality of thinking of everything from rock to plants to living beings including humans as "resources". We have to regard nature and human rights as primary, live sustainably and then we can (if we have the means then) go explore. To go out in space in a hope to finding a solution for our present problems there is madness and will just result in worse problems.

So I do not oppose space travel or colonies, but I think the culture of humans has to evolve first, so I am not in favour of these ideas at the present time. It is not polite to look for a new home because one is unable to learn how to not wreck the home one is living in.