1: It's awesome. It's desirable for the same reason fast cars, fun computer games, giant pyramids, and sex is.
2: It's an insurance policy against things that might wreck the earth but not other planets/solar systems.
3: Insofar as we can imagine there to be other alien races, understanding space colonization is extremely important either for trade or self defense.
4: It's possible different subsets of humanity can never happily coexist, in which case having arbitrarily large amounts of space to live in ensures more peace and stability.
It's awesome. It's desirable for the same reason fast cars, fun computer games, giant pyramids, and sex is.
In sci-fi maybe. I doubt people actually living in space (or on un-Earth-like planets) would concur, without some very extensive technological change.
It's possible different subsets of humanity can never happily coexist, in which case having arbitrarily large amounts of space to live in ensures more peace and stability.
New incompatible sub-subsets will just keep arising in new colonies - as has happened historically.
r/Fitness does a weekly "Moronic Monday", a judgment-free thread where people can ask questions that they would ordinarily feel embarrassed for not knowing the answer to. I thought this seemed like a useful thing to have here - after all, the concepts discussed on LessWrong are probably at least a little harder to grasp than those of weightlifting. Plus, I have a few stupid questions of my own, so it doesn't seem unreasonable that other people might as well.