The human race and our descendants can only benefit from space colonization. A fast decline of our population will not necessarily come with a guaranteed survival for one of our next generations on Earth. Finally, safety always pays off!
So ad astra with http://www.longecity...it-from-x-prize and towards http://www.theengine...1009410.article the moon.
Before the rocket goes up, just enjoy some easy math for a simple calculation involving the concept of "sapienocide" which is just a new word to define an event when the entire human race is getting extinct. It can happen that the gross value of all consumable resources incl. produced items and services on Earth is getting higher than a quintillion Dollars. Their net value, however, appears when consumers are just happy. A painful perception instead of pleasure has to be subtracted from the gross value, thus: pleasure minus pain = net value of resources.
About the chance that an experiment in dangerous research like particle physics or reproductive nano machines http://lifeboat.com/ex/nano.shield triggers an atomic chain reaction that changes the living environment of the Earth to the point of sapienocide: within the actual decade, the extinction risk for this Century might turn out to be estimated as only 1 in a hundred, also one percent. But due to the manic greed for more scientific knowledge deriving from greater physics research experiments, the next decade could bring humanity an extinction risk of more than three percent within this Century and more than twice as much within the next. So a risk of 10 percent for a sapienocide in the 22nd Century could be quite a plausible example when compared to other estimates in hindsight to risk evaluation.
When a great catastrophe is growing so much within this Century that all mammalian life gets annihilated, the gross value of consumable resources on Earth gets down to the equivalent of only one million Dollars. Despite of that great great loss in the range of multiple quadrillions, emotions could still be felt by an astronaut in an orbital station. An astronaut could survive the extreme compression of our Earth for some days after the intercontinental destruction which will most likely appear http://www.longecity...-earth-required in response of a delayed atomic chain reaction many decades after a misguided particle collision.
Even with a gross value above one billion Dollars in an orbital environment, an astronaut is getting so miserable from the intercontinental destruction event that net value of all enjoyable resources is getting down to the previous costs of a small submarine vessel. This calculation has not been adjusted by the beneficial qualities of an undersea environment for the simulation of colonization methods in outer space.
A small submarine habitat for hundred million Dollars could be endowed with a safety surplus that amounts to about a quadrillion dollars within half a Century. This amount includes the assembly of heavy shielding walls for a sealed submarine sphere. Sealing http://seasteading.o...oofing-concrete could be tight enough to simulate exposure in vacuum whereas a decent thickness of heavy plates in the outer walls could suggest enough shielding against increased radiation as existing in outer space.