Elon Musk, the billionaire founder and CEO of the private spaceflight company SpaceX, wants to help establish a Mars colony of up to 80,000 people by ferrying explorers to the Red Planet for perhaps $500,000 a trip.
(...) we've put all our eggs in one basket. If we were on many worlds and were to mess up down here, there's a way for the human species to continue. I don't for a moment propose that the Earth is a disposable planet, and we have to put enormous efforts into making sure we don't muss up down here. But there is a chance.
If a Mars colony mitigates catastrophic risk (extinction risk?) from climate change,
then climate change is not an existential risk to human civilization on earth.
If humans can thrive on Mars, Earth based humanity will be able to cope with any climate change less drastic than transforming the climate of Earth to something as hostile as the current climate of Mars.
Is climate change seriously considered to be an existential risk? It seems to 1st order climate change would just move population densities, to 2nd order there might be net less or net more land and ag resources after the climate change, and either 2nd or 3rd order, the rate of hurricanes and other weather storms is changed.
It doesn't seem to me that something which reduces human population from 6 billion to 2 billion should be considered an existential threat. A threat, yes, an expense we would prefer not to tolerate, perhaps. But a game ender? Not the way I play.