What good, exactly, was the Moon landing? Don't get me wrong - I saw it with my own eyes, it was a great accomplishment, but what did it lead to, fifty years later?

All the benefits of space so far - all of them - come from Low Earth Orbit activities. Teflon, weather satellites, the microchip - all of these.

You act as if we have infinite money to spend the quadrillion dollars or so it would take to set up a self-sustaining colony.

But we don't. The other use of that money would be to save the Earth from our own obsessive consumption and pollution.

We have two choices. One is to save the Earth, the only living planet we know of, from the climate catastrophe. The other is to abandon the Earth, to allow nearly all humans to die, and for a few billionaires to move to the airless, arid, freezing cold, dark, lifeless, poisonous, radioactive deserts of Mars, there to live in pressurized domes for centuries.

"Elon and Jeff" won't take you with them when they abandon the planet you know - you'll be here to die with the rest of us.