I've been reading SF for over 50 years, and to be honest, I just don't see any writers making the mistakes you talk about.

No, the big mistake is that idea that space colonization is going to happen at all.

It would take centuries and quadrillions of dollars to colonize even Mars - and to what purpose? It's a dark, freezing cold, airless, arid, lifeless, radioactive, poisonous desert.

No one lives at the bottom of the ocean or in Antarctica (research stations have all their food flown in so they don't count), and yet these two places are infinitely more hospitable than Mars in every single way.

Meanwhile, we have an immediate crisis right here on Earth, that being the Sixth Extinction. We are busy decimating the one biosphere that we actually know exists, and we won't stop - in fact, each year we accelerate the damage.

Generations before we could have even a limping colony on Mars our ecosystem here will collapse.

Don't get me wrong - if we are to survive in the very-long-term, we need to become a space dwelling species, but in the very short-term, we need to stabilize our birth planet.

And I don't think this will happen. Billionaires will obsess on cryptocurrencies and Martian colonies; our governments will wring their hands and do nothing; and it will all come down.

I welcome any rational hope to the contrary.