It's one thing to offer a contrary view, but please don't fulminate. The more contrary a view is, i.e. the more it contradicts the audience's beliefs, the more important it is to present substantively. Otherwise (assuming you're correct) you do a disservice to the truth, in addition to igniting the obvious flamewar and making this site worse.
I wrote a long essay about this that I have yet to publish, but my basic point is this:
1. Mars is a fucking desert. There is no air, water or life.
2. Venus is covered in CO2 clouds and sulfuric acid rain. Metal melts on its surface.
We are not going to live in space. To even WANT to live in space is an absurd fantasy that is in violent conflict with the reality of space as an airless, inhospitable, largely resourceless wasteland that requires enormous effort to travel through and survive in.
Why, then, does Musk insist we need to live in space? I think this is simply an update of our previous desire for an afterlife or a heaven. Since we are no longer willing to fantasize and organize around the Kingdom of Heaven, we've turned space into the Kingdom of Heaven, despite the fact that it has very few actual heavenly qualities.
We need to live in space because having all human life on one planet is intrinsically unreliable. However lucky we get, every year there is a tiny chance that we are all killed by anything from an asteroid impact to global climate change. No matter how small that chance is, what it means is given enough time, eventually this planet will no longer be host to humans. We need to branch out to other planets before that happens if our civilization is to survive.
Yes, it requires a lot of effort to do it. It required a lot of effort to build the first airplanes (I can find you many, many quotes similar to yours about how 'man was not meant to fly though the air like a bird'). That doesn't mean you shouldn't try to do it.
I will also remind you that at many points in history (for the vast majority of its existence in fact) the Earth was an inhospitable wasteland. Given time and innovation we can make space a more welcoming environment.
Birds also don't launch satellites in space, but every time I fire up my GPS our effort on that front is appreciated. Your argument is that we can only do things other living things do?
There is no doubt we would be doing something novel here, I don't think anyone is saying any different. The question is if it's A. possible and B. worth the effort.
You might want to go read up on Mars before you publish that essay... Mars has an atmosphere and lots of water ice. You can grow plants on Mars by compressing the atmosphere. You can use the atmosphere plus water to make methane rocket fuel, and water to make LOX.
For Venus, the way to build a colony is to place it way up in the atmosphere, at Earth pressure.
I know plenty about Mars. The atmospheric pressure at the surface is 600 pascals; the water is almost entirely polar. This is not a habitable planet, as evidenced by the fact that it is totally devoid of life.
Venus is even worse; it has a day longer than its orbital period.
If your idea of a good life is floating above a pool of noxious gases, there are plenty of places on Earth you could accomplish the same for much less money and effort.
Why'd you say Mars has no water or air, if you know it has water and air? You also don't know if it has life or not. If these are examples of how you're going to argue in your essay, I don't think you're going to convince many people.
When we were climbing down from the trees a million years ago, similar doubts were surely being raised as to the inhospitality of the ground environment. Not as educated doubts, of course.
Inspiration is a tautological goal. "Why do we do X? Because it is inspiring!" only works if we find X worthy for some reason. How about: real goals that substantively improve life on Earth?
I'm okay with that. You don't have to be inspired by it. I am, and I think many other people are as well.
Human civilization has a lot of problems. I don't know how to solve them. I believe that demonstrations of human ingenuity, capability, and technological aptitude have the potential to cause people to aspire to achieve something, maybe to solve "real problems".
The best part is that they aren't mutually exclusive. I'm all in favor of improving life on Earth too, and I'm interested in hearing some of your ideas of ways to solve the problems we have here.
People who try to study the evolution of well-being (for various definitions of it) show that it stagnated (best case) or started dropping with the generations born in the 60's and 70's. So obviously nothing improved life in those years and decades which follow space exploration.
