RightFoot / Stratocaster - You two are just fishes in a small fishbowl, thinking there's nothing to the world but this little ball of dirt... You think we should play it isolationist with the rest of space.
Just a tiny clue as to how wrong that is: The rock due to hit Mars (1 in 75 chance at this point) in a few weeks is about the size of Tunguska's. It's big enough to deliver that much energy, but small enough that it wasn't detected before just a few months before it was due to impact.
Such an impactor on course for Earth would have had to have been detected years, if not decades before ETA if anyone could have done anything about it. I'll let you figure out what something like that small piece of flying rock will do if it hits anywhere near a city.
Who's doing anything about such rocks headed our way? Just about nobody.. Because "it's just some rock thousands of miles away".
There's unlimited free energy for all the world to leech right next to us.. It's just above our heads. There's almost unlimited space free for us to capitalize on, and some freakin gamma rays, micrometeorids or other hazards are no more unsurmountable to us than indians, isolation from civilization, wild life and whatever boogie men people expected (e.g. "Here be monsters" on ancient ocean maps) were back in the day of Lewis and Clark.
The analogy is very real.
What do people who just live a mediocre life contribute to the advancement of humanity? Nothing, besides more or less good earthly events or people like Britney Spears' to cheer or boo about.. Or ridicule Space exploration contraptions because they've never seen anything like it before, or ridicule Columbus because the Earth is obviously flat.
The advancement of humanity isn't some abstraction, it's the difference between living in caves and having a house and lawn to mow undisturbed by a mob of outlaws with other intentions.. The difference between eating good food and stale crap like you might have found on a store's shelf in the wild west. Think that's no big deal? Wouldn't you want your kids to grow up with today's quality of health and education as opposed to that of back then? Or of back in the middle ages? You want that because it's what's best for them. That you could do without it yourself is just a matter of being rugged enough to live that sort of arduous life, but it doesn't mean it's better. It's the difference between living to 45 years old or so and then a few more as a near cripple before buying the farm, and living in good health past 70 as we can today. What about tomorrow? The curve of improvement isn't flat.. Look at how much was done in the last two centuries, and compare with the previous two.. That curve didn't happen with people sitting on their thumbs or cheering at the latest hollywood drama..
That curve isn't just a statistic, it's hard evidence of a trait that everyone has - everyone, without exception, wants what's best for them.. No matter the order of magnitude - If you've got a plumber who does **** work, you'll fire him for a better one. If you're a plumber who does average work and strive to improve it to the best in the region, you'll live better and others will too, win-win; and that is what nature will promote: You'll survive and best the other stupid schmuck who didn't see opportunity knock at his door.
Given any choice between good and better, people will take better every single time. And that means that anyone who fails to recognize better as better than good will oppose better. The same way people in the middle east don't want to get past a tribal and sheltered lifestyle. The same way people don't like new ideas, they like a comfy little warm place to settle in because beyond it is the adversity of having to improvise new solutions for new problems.
There's nothing to gain from such stagnation. Nothing to gain from saying space is empty and void, that it has nothing we can mine for resources, no room we can colonize, no new knowledge we can reap benefits from even by stumbling upon it the same way some two brothers called Wright did.
As for the most fundamental reason we should get off this rock, it's the same that made the USA happen.
Manifest Destiny, obviously enough.
Homeliness and a general resignation that what we have now couldn't be made better (a little home with comfy cushions for lazy bellybutton to sit on, etc) is no good reason to stagnate. The same way people won't disturb the status quo when electing a president (e.g. who cares if the GOP's drifted away from its original constitutional intentions, it still gets most people's vote), people generaly don't want to get out of their comfort zone.
