I want to make an argument that sounds arrogant but isn't meant to be: the Earth is too important to be the only place where humanity lives. This is not a statement about escaping problems. We cannot escape our problems by moving them to Mars. Any human settlement anywhere will carry the full cargo of human nature — the creativity and the cruelty, the generosity and the tribalism, all of it. There is no clean-slate destination. But there is a different kind of argument, one rooted not in escap
