First off Chairboy, "Straw Man" is where someone constructs an argument held by no one for the pure purpose of destroying it.
Should you bother to read what others actually say, you will find Otto making just the argument I was responding to.
By the way, if you feel so strongly that we still deserve to die as a race, then by all means take the first step yourself and leave the rest of us to make our own decisions about whether or not you're right
now this is a classic fallacy of complex question. I did not say I felt that we deserve to die as a race. I said that if we screwed things up so badly that terraforming seemed like a cheap solution to our environmental problems, we deserved to die. And what was that line from The Lord of the Rings, anyway?
And terraforming Mars isn't like colonizing the Americas or Hawaii. Those places already had people living in them, and thus it wasn't an impossibly expensive venture.
You can talk about terraforming all you want, and sure, it sounds cool. When it becomes economically feasible to commission a study to see how possible it is, then we'll talk.
And by the way, here's the full logic:
Terraforming involves massive manipulation of a planet's environment to make it livable.
Mars is far away, and getting there is very expensive.
Hence, it makes more sense to use the technologies one would employ in terraforming on the earth first.
Lebensraum may be a good idea, but whenever you bring it up, you need to look at the price tag. If terraforming Mars is dirt cheap, say under a billion human lives, it may be worth it. Odds are it's not, and pouring tons of money into some hugely expensive and impractical pipe dream instead of addressing real social and environmental problems on earth is irresponsible.
Now go take your silly fallacies into someone else's woods please.
