For Lee Billings, the author of Five Billion Years Of Solitude: The Search For Life Among The Stars, space exploration offers “the only chance available for life on Earth to somehow escape a final, ultimate planetary and stellar death”:
We really owe our progress and our current state not only to our biology, but also to our planetary resources – to the fossil fuels we burn, the ores we mine, the rich diversity of other species we exploit, and so on. We’re presently using most of those resources in very unsustainable ways. We’ve already plucked all the low-hanging fruit, and much of what we are burning and mining and exploiting now is only available to use through our already sophisticated technology.
So if we somehow drive ourselves extinct, if all our great edifices collapse, I think it would be very difficult if not impossible for anything else to rise up and rebuild to where we are now, even given a half-billion or a billion years. People can and will disagree with me about that, but my position errs on the side of caution, on the side that says humanity’s present moment in the Sun is too valuable to treat as something disposable.
And before the Sun dies out, we will continue to get incredible footage like this:
(Photo: Image of the Earth and Moon taken by the MESSENGER spacecraft from a distance of 61 million miles. By NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Carnegie Institution of Washington)
The Dish 