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Is there much out there to find, that requires physical human presence?


No. In theory you can mine everything with robots.

However, every year you stay on Earth, you're kinda like throwing a 1d100 whether you get a WWIII and it turns into a nuclear wasteland or not. You can keep throwing it and hope it doesn't happen in your generation, or, you can get out of it and have a backup plan.


This is an interesting framing, because presumably the first space-living people will actually have a much greater than a 1d100 chance of dying in some horrible space-related way. We then basically have a collective action problem: in order for the species to have a better chance of survival, individuals have to do things that actually lower their chances of survival.

I think the first first experiments won't have any problem finding volunteers because we've been so acculturated to think of space travel as being "cool," but presumably after the first few extraterrestrial colonies dramatically cease to exist after explosive decompression accidents or are simultaneously poisoned by bizarrely-mutated e.coli variants in their water supplies, people will be much less eager to move off the nice, familiar, safe-seeming Earth.




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