You can fly into space, but you can't hide

One of my favourite questions is 'why do we want the human race to survive?' People seem very keen on the idea, but when I question this instinct they either look blank or think I'm crazy. Quite possibly both.

So when Cobweb posted on escaping to another planet the question formed on my lips as predictably as a lemming walking off a cliff. (Some 1990s gamers seemed overly keen on our green haired friends living on, but I digress).

Why does it matter if we, as a species die out? I can understand why individuals take their own survival pretty seriously, but to worry about a 'lucky' few moving onto some far flung rock not particularly suited to sustain humanity in a few hundred years seems like a bad idea. The idea of my descendants eeking out some dreary existence away from earth seems...pointless.

The other arguments put forward for space exploration are generally two fold. Firstly that it produces spin off science that is useful for helping people on earth. Don't get me started on that one - it's basically saying that the best way to give clean drinking water to the world (estimated cost £1 billion) is to spend £60 billion on sending a probe to Mars. It's just that the second way is more fun.

Second is the curiosity factor, exploration, knowledge, the final frontier. This makes more sense to me and seems more honest - there is a curiosity and enterprise in the human spirit and I can see that collaborative space exploration edifying to the collective human condition. And at least it's not dressing exploration up as some gloriously ethical idea. Fairly sure it's not worth the money, but I see the argument.

We're on this planet together and on the whole it's a pretty great place until we started screwing with it. If we can't figure out a way of saving it then we shouldn't be so presumptious to assume that it's worth us homosapiens trying to run off somewhere else.