Again, it's like worrying about lung cancer when your house is on fire.
Such a volcano could erupt, but based on our previous history, the chances are less than one in a thousand.
On the other hand, right now it seems *certain* that we're going to break right through +5ºC in temperature change, devastate every single ecosystem on the planet, and dramatically reduce the carrying capacity of the globe for millennia to come.
You focus on the 0.1% threat rather than the 99% threat because you want to justify space exploration. I love space travel, but every single bit of the utility we've gotten out of space in the last sixty years in space has been from Low Earth Orbit, within a few hundred miles of the Earth's surface.
Bringing more raw materials back from the asteroids in industrial quantities isn't going to happen for generations, far too late to help, and how exactly will these raw materials help anyway?
Humans are obsessed with consumption. We have spent the last two hundred and fifty years turning raw materials into waste at an exponentially growing rate and we are choking on those wastes, not just from the carbon dioxide but the plastic in almost every drop of water in the natural world, and the increasing deforestation of the planet.
And your suggestion to this existential threat is to bring in more raw materials from the asteroid belt to turn into even more waste?
To an addict, the solution is always more of the drug, but eventually the reckoning comes.
What's either sad or funny, I don't know which, is that bringing back raw materials from space does not actually address the issue of the climate emergency at all. You just think that space mining is so marvellous that all the problems will naturally go away. We'll turn all the Earth into one great blast furnace from all that ore from the asteroids and everything will be fine!
Your wildly unrealistic attitude spells death for our whole civilization, not in billions of years when the sun goes out, not in millions years when an asteroid hits, or tens of thousands of years when a volcano goes off, but over centuries, even over a few generations.
We need to transform the entire world's energy infrastructure toward nuclear and renewables as quickly possible. We need to spend every penny we can on fusion power. We need to get rid of the internal combustion engine for good, and we need to start pumping CO2 out of the air so we can mitigate at least some of the terrible damage to our climate and therefore the entire natural and human world, damage that's already baked in.
And we need to have already started it, and we haven't It might already be too late.
Believing the magical space fairy will bring us some unspecified solution to the ongoing destruction of our biosphere has no basis in reality.
If we want to exploit the resources of the planets, we cannot do so from a dying Earth. Only once we have stabilized the only living planet we know of so it will survive and thrive for the living future can we turn our attention to the much longer term.
