Exactly. A truly intelligent species doesn't put all its eggs in one basket. Plus, a truly intelligent species knows that expansion (in population) is good for the survival of the species and civilization, and the way to get more resources and space is to go to space and acquire resources there and also learn to live there.

The dinosaurs are a good example of a group of species that weren't far-sighted enough to invest in a serious space exploration and settlement program.

> The dinosaurs are a good example of a group of species that weren't far-sighted enough to invest in a serious space exploration and settlement program.

If we knew that a cretaceous extinction event will happen five, fifty, or five hundred years from now, it'll be orders of magnitude easier for civilization to survive on Earth, then it will be for it to survive in space.

If dinosaurs had opposable thumbs, and technology, they would have been better off bunkering down. No matter how uninhabitable some freak civilization-ending event would leave the Earth, it would still be more habitable then anywhere else in the Solar system.

With the correct technology, that's not true: it's perfectly possible to build very nice habitats in space with O'Neill cylinders, but you need a lot of technology and space-based infrastructure to make that happen. A truly intelligent species would be working hard on that problem, because the technologies needed to make big O'Neill cylinders would also have many, many other uses. A stupid species, on the other hand, would dedicate its most intelligent members to figuring out how to advertise to each other more effectively and sell each other useless crap.

It's also quite possible to do multiple things at once when you have a civilization with many members. So as I said before, a truly intelligent species would not put all its eggs in one basket. They'd work on figuring out how to colonize space at the same time as figuring out how to deflect asteroids and also handle asteroid impacts if they did happen.

> A truly intelligent species would be doing both.

When you have limited resources, you deal with a problem that's going to affect half the population of the planet in the next 20 years, as opposed to dealing with a much harder problem that might affect the entire population of the planet in a once-per-fifty-million-years lottery.

We are currently putting all of our eggs in one basket, because climate change will kill modern civilization much faster then we can move the entirety of modern civilization into a <even less hospitable off-planet environment>.

This isn't true at all. A somewhat-intelligent species with limited resources would indeed work no dealing with such a problem. However, a stupid species would simply ignore the problem, which is exactly what we're doing.

Do you live in an off-the-grid nuclear bunker, or a home? Do you wear a bulletproof vest, and a motorcycle helmet when driving a car, or walking on a sidewalk? Do you hoard decades worth of food?

An 'intelligent' person would do all of those things - because, after all, nuclear war can start any moment, our roads and sidewalks are dangerous places, and you never know where your next meal is going to come from.

Worrying about planet-ending disasters, and establishing civilization in space is much like doing any of the things I've listed. It's not intelligent - it's a non-cost-efficient response to incredibly unlikely occurrences. Especially when there are incredibly likely occurrences, that we'd be much better off preparing for, instead.

These are bad comparisons. There are too many people on Earth now for us to acquire all our resources here without a large environmental cost, which even without a killer asteroid is going to bite us in the ass. There's endless resources in space, so logically we should be building the technology and capability to go there and harvest them. A by-product of that is also being able to live there and have an insurance policy just in case there's a planet-ending disaster.

In short, planet-ending disasters are not the only reason to develop these capabilities, and it's shortsighted and stupid to continue to destroy our environment here without taking advantage of all the resources and opportunities outside our gravity well.

The economic cost of extracting Earth resources + environmental restoration/remediation is many orders of magnitude lower then the cost of extracting space resources, and will remain many orders of magnitude lower for any realistic projections of the future.

If we cared about this sort of thing, we would be doing it now, as opposed to sitting on our hands, waiting for magical space unicorns to be invented.