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NASA Says Mars Rocks Formed in a Salty Sea
NASA has made another announcement, live on NASA TV, regarding the discoveries of the Spirit and Opportunity rovers. They believe that the rocks examined by Opportunity were actually formed in water; that those rocks were actually sediments laid down in a shallow salty sea. They've already had outside scientists examine their data and those scientists concur with the conclusions. NASA has a story with explanations and some photos.
"Space-tourist" was name calling... not the best form of discourse, I admit, but nonetheless meant as a characterization of you, not your position. The point is that the people who drag out the "species survival" argument are, in fact, usually space-tourist wannabees (or lovers of "exploration" and "the human spirit", which are just romanticized words for tourism), who know that their simple desire to go to space, or see others go to space, just to go, won't convince other people, so they try for something else.
A huge asteroid could hit the Earth next Tuesday, but it won't. The interarrival time for asteroids big enough to cause mass extinctions has historically been in the tens of millions of years... and it's unlikely that even a Cretacious-sized impact would cause the complete extinction of the human species. A hundred years, or a thousand, is not a significant time on that sort of scale, and you have to start to worry about other factors... like what you're giving up if you devote resources to manned space flight, and who you're taking those resources from.
The second point is relevant on the same timescale you have already introduced. There's a much better than even chance that, if you were to check back right before the next Cretacious-sized asteroid impact, you wouldn't find any species that you'd recognize as "human" just because of normal evolutionary drift. You'd therefore have nothing to protect.
You did not, of course, read my third point at all, since you missed the direct statement that "individuals are inherently valuable". Let me spell it out for you again. INDIVIDUALS ARE INHERENTLY VALUABLE. Species are not, or at least don't fall into the same class. Sit down and think about it for a while; it's not that difficult a distinction.
That means that not only am I not going to kill myself, but I wouldn't let you kill anybody to preserve an abstraction like a species.