Basically, it costs too much, it doesn't actually deter criminals from committing murder or high treason, and it is provably misapplied from time to time. It's past time we did away with it, and saved the taxpayer the expense of an expensive, ineffective, and occasionally supremely unjust Medieval legal sanction.
Arguably, from a purely practical standpoint, you could take the Judge Dredd option and remove objections A and B at the expense of increasing C: make executions so cheap and so common that even if they don't deter, they stop reoffending. And if you decide that the worth of a human life isn't that big after all - or if you just don't bother to investigate the false positive rate - you don't have to worry about C. This is the route that a lot of dictatorships ended up going.
This is why I prefer a moral objection rather than a "practical" one. Because entirely practical arguments historically haven't stopped the practice.
I think rights are defined by law. If unborn babies had no rights in the eyes of the law, that would not be true (at least to me).
I don't think that's true, at least in the United States. The whole concept of "natural rights" in the Bill of Rights is that they exist prior to law and are recognised by law, not created by law, and that the law is always subject to being superseded by actual rights. Hence why you all had a revolution against your duly constituted legal monarch and felt justified in doing so, because you believed that the natural right of being born in a country was more important than some piece of paper saying that you were a subject. The Bill of Rights enumerates rights to clarify things, but only as an example, not as a limiting set.
But the US founding fathers did literally say "born", not "conceived", so the idea of an unborn person having rights seems like it would require reading a "penumbra" into the Constitution just like the "mother's right of privacy". It seems a logical extrapolation, but not quite derivable from the Constitution as written.
Abortion still seems squicky to me, as does the death penalty and the "right to bear guns" and corporate personhood. Where does that put me politically? Nowhere at home in either major US political wing, (so thank goodness I'm not an American).
recognizing that one can follow a good and righteous path without concern about where it is leading.
That kind of spirituality would seem to be at odds with the Nuremberg Defense, as well as a good chunk of common-sense law . Post WW2, the civilised Western world has at least technically held that having no concern about where your path is leading and what the results of your actions are going to be is the opposite of being good and righteous. And most ordinary people would agree.
"But your Honour, I was just following orders! I'm not responsible for what I was doing! I was merely being in the moment, living day to day like a blithe butterfly without weighting myself down with heavy moral debates about whether shooting civilians was 'moral' or 'immoral' by your ridiculous outdated code! It's not my place to know if those people I shot 'should' or 'shouldn't' have lived long or productive lives! To do so is arrogance and a fallacy! They merely lived, and then stopped living when my bullet entered their skull! It's all a beautiful circle of life! You should all just lighten up and get hip to the vibe, man! Live in the present moment and forget the fantasy of 'my past actions' as I already have. I'm actually the most spiritually enlightened one in this courtroom!"
Yeah, I don't see that argument really going very far.
Defining a function inline to your statement, and in that function performing evaluations in your return call that are based upon objects that may be null when you execute an operation on them?
Hmm? You've just described the essence of functional programming (anonymous closures returned by functions-as-evaluations). Perhaps you don't like FP or consider it strange, but I'm not sure you've made a case that functional programming is any less disciplined than imperative object-oriented programming, or less suited to large-scale programming. FP predated OOP as a programming style, after all, and it's based on a far more rigorous mathematical foundation (I'd be interested to see any clear widely-accepted definition of OOP at all, let alone a mathematical one!)
What was the time span from Madam Curie's work to commercial nuclear power?
About 50 years, depending on how you calculate it. Radium isolated by the Curies in 1906. First commercial power plant (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power#Origins) in Russia in 1954.
But note that the key theoretical idea, the fission chain reaction, surfaced via Szilard as early as 1933, and Fermi's reactor was 1941. So from the first glimmerings of a practical nuclear fission theory to a practical demonstration was less than a decade!
What's missing in the rest of theoretical physics is anything approaching a key insight like the fission chain reaction. We simply don't have anything that looks like it could be "scaled up" in energy output. The opposite seems to be the case - every tiny data point now requires vastly increased energy input.
Then there is this little thing called the world-wide-web invented by this guy Tim Burners-Lee to enable Particle Physics working at CERN to better collaborate.
Do these spin-offs count to CERN or Particle Physics net economic worth?
No, I really don't think they do. At least they shouldn't where science is concerned.
If you set out to do X, and pour millions of dollars into doing X, but in the end you fail at doing X, even if in the process you end up doing Y, it is still the case that doing X in itself was not a sensible goal. You would have been better and cheaper to just sit down and do Y from the beginning.
We might as well say that gathering giant multi-story piles of $10 banknotes into heaps and burning them is a worthwhile economic endeavour because doing it will teach us a lot about the science of paper folding, stacking and combustion. Or that spending all your income on the horse races will teach you a lot about the mathematics of probability. Yes, it will as a side effect.... but is it actually a sensible investment priority?
The sad fact appears to be that since the 1930s, high-energy and particle physics has delivered hugely disappointing diminishing returns. Especially compared to what was accomplished in the three decades before. The exotic particle zoo remains almost entirely a lab curiosity, fusion seems to constantly struggle with unexpected behaviour of plasma dynamics, fission can power steam engines but remains fundamentally unstable and toxic... while good old electromagnetics - QED at best, but mostly pre-QED Maxwell - keeps quietly delivering revolution after revolution.
Something is strange with this picture. Most of the really revolutionary pre-WW2 physics got done on a shoestring budget by today's standards. Seems like the massive amounts of government and military money that got poured into physics after the Manhattan Project didn't really lead to all that much. Certainly not to revolutions on the scale of the uranium and plutonium bombs. In retrospect, the H-bomb still seems like the pinnacle of the investment/return curve for "new physics". And that was in the 1950s. The big advances since then seem to mostly be materials science and industrial processes; impressive, but not theoretically ground-breaking. The theoretical "breakthroughs" since then like QCD seem sterile when it comes to actual applications outside of explaining what goes on inside a particle accelerator.
This is not what I expected when I learned about physics in high school in the 1980s. I was expecting a singularity-like curve of ever-increasing breakthroughs by the 2010s; instead we seem to have a curve of the opposite shape, generating quantitatively vast amounts more data, but qualitatively less interesting ideas. We're still just tinkering with variables in what's essentially a theory locked down in the 1930s.
Again, note that this is just an outsider's view of theoretical physics, not of science or industry as a whole. No doubt many of the theoretical advances since the 1930s look really exciting to insiders. But are they? The computer revolution seems to be an anomaly by comparison; I'm not sure a Moore's Law exists for theoretical physics.
To make that goal, these scientists should probably go on a retreat, spend some time on team building exercises, and practice dynamic solution strategies, so that they can build up the synergies they need to deliver agile, customer-facing world class results that deliver a genuine Six Sigma experience.
A customer-facing giant accelerated relativistic particle ray, eh? I like the cut of your jib!
Don't worry. The higgs exists. If it doesn't they will fabricate it. They have to because if they don't then they might have to finally reveal the truth.
That we've actually been secretly using the Black Mesa Lambda Complex dark fusion reactor to slingshot our teleport signals via a Xen relay in order to hide our illicit entanglement research from both the Nihilanth and the Combine? Pfft, everybody knows that. What you should be asking is, how come the Portal Storms and the Seven Hour War happened after Gordon and the G-Man gained control of the border world. Hmm?
Voyagers 1 and 2. They're just veeeeery sloooow interstellar travel, and not flesh and blood travellers, but who says the galaxy has to play by human standards?
7) Star Trek Replicators
Paramount actually has one of these. It started off well, but accumulating single-bit errors in the Heisenberg compensators of the pattern buffers caused accelerated devolution, resulting in Voyager, Enterprise, and finally the JJ Abrams movie.
Due to industrial espionage from Lucasfilm, the technology is now in the hands of the wider Hollywood community, which is why we're seeing so many "reboots". If Gary Seven doesn't intervene, we project a 99% certainty that all new TV and movie properties in the year 2020 will involve lizard-men beating each other with rocks.
Sure it'd be cool to have tiny pocket-sized computers, but who has the budget to build them?
The branch of the government that wanted to put computers on ballistic missiles. And on fighters and bombers. And on submarines. Etc.. etc... That branch isn't NASA.
True, and frighteningly often forgotten.
"The shiny Space Future: brought to you by the people who decided it would be cool to build thousands of flying robots that can melt cities into toxic slag. And hold them over your head, on a hair trigger, for the rest of your life. Mmm-hmm! Smell that, son? That there is 100% home-grown Apocalypse, and ain't she a beauty! Oh and by the way you also get a compu-tater in-tron-net or somesuch machine. I don't understand the specifics but the backroom boys say it's a way for you to chat to all your little friends and play wholesome patriotic war-games and steal movies. Heh. But don't worry, we'll throw you in jail if you even think of doing that last one. No, don't say a word. You can thank us by joining the Army when you grow up!"
"We choose to go to the moon! We choose to go to the moon in this decade, and do other.... things... to other, er, Things... with, ah, stuff.... for the purposes of - ahem - certain objectives.... tasking some rather particular, mmm, assets... about which which I'm not at liberty to comment further, and I'd appreciate it if you'd not repeat that last part. Heh heh. Good times. Anyone for coffee?"
Without the lash of the Communist menace, Congress would not have spend trillions to shoot people into space.
Trillions? I'm sure it should only take a few thousand dollars to vacuum-adapt the firing pins of an M-16. The hard part would be working out what to do with the the recoil -
Oh, shoot people into space. My bad. Yeah, that part probably does cost trillions.
My expectation (without real medical information) would be that bone, and muscle would be maintained by the body to a level adequate to support the excretion required.
I knew that life in space would be shitty, but I had no idea...
What you're suggesting would be like humanity deciding on December 18, 1903, to not bother trying to build any more tunnels to the lost Atlantean purple dinosaur babe paradise at the center of the earth until we could build one that can get out of the coal mines and is actually lava-proofed.
Edited for realistic comparison.
"But we can't quit the Sub-Atlantean Drill Project! Not now, when we're so close! We did one Mohole and never went back! How will mankind survive the coming Mole Men War without all the resources of Sub-Atlantea? Those foolish surface-dwellers simply can't comprehend the limitless resources of the hollow earth! I know it's all down there because I read it in a documentary pictorial magazine called Astounding Tales!"
If America closes its frontier completely and doesn't move out to the rest of the Solar System...
And there I think you've hit the nail on the head.
The reason America has both dreams and handwringing about space in the first place is that it still is living on dreams of a frontier - and on an economic system adapted to 500 years of exploitation of that frontier. But the frontier has long closed. And yet, the frontier-capitalist hyper-growth model - "there's always somewhere new to move to" - has now been exported to the rest of the world. That's a problem.
We can't solve this, realistically, by going back into space, because space just isn't an exploitable frontier in the same way that the Americas were 500 years ago. It might become such a frontier in the future, but we can't get there from here using the exploitative, expansive, unsustainable economic systems we currently have.
We'll have to build closed life-support ships-in-bottles to do long-duration spaceflight, and those are likely to be the exact opposite of frontier communities unless we have some kind of near-organic magitech, on the order of Star Trek's Genesis bomb, which can insta-smelt biospheres out of lunar regolith. And if we had that on Earth, we could make the deserts bloom and bring back the whales first.
The 'all eggs in one basket' argument is not about keeping alive the entire population of the Earth, it is simply an argument that we need to have a viable colony somewhere other than the Earth to prevent extinction. I agree that it is unlikely that our growth vs. environment problem will be solved by space industry/colonization.
But why would that colony not be vulnerable to exactly the same extinction event? War or plague will spread via space trade routes, and space colonies are more vulnerable to asteroid strikes than Earth is.
We've got trillions of years before that happened- look at how far technology has progressed in 1000 years- you think given such an unthinkable time available humanity would control the universe?
Yes, but there'd be a huge intergalactic standards war between Facespace, iVerse, the Googleplex Continuum, and Microsoft Pocket Dimension Two Billion and Twelve.
A generation ship makes sense after, and only after, life, in nearby settlements, is secured against the decline of the earth.
How could the Earth conceivably "decline" to be worse than Mars, let alone Venus or the Moon or an empty bottle carved from an asteroid?
Nuclear war wouldn't do it. Fossil fuel and aquifer depletion wouldn't do it. Multiple asteroid strikes couldn't do it.
The only thing I could imagine making the Earth a worse place than the rest of the solar system is someone deliberately erasing it with a localised black hole. Even if you just blew it into chunks the chunks would still be far more valuable than the asteroids.
You don't need to terraform to have a place to live. Multiple large vessels, freely orbiting and rotating to supply artificial gravity, would do nicely.
Multiple large greenhouses on Earth would do even nicer. You'd get oxygen and sunlight for free, and your bones wouldn't crack. Why do you want to be in space?
Slashdot Mirror
Basically, it costs too much, it doesn't actually deter criminals from committing murder or high treason, and it is provably misapplied from time to time. It's past time we did away with it, and saved the taxpayer the expense of an expensive, ineffective, and occasionally supremely unjust Medieval legal sanction.
Arguably, from a purely practical standpoint, you could take the Judge Dredd option and remove objections A and B at the expense of increasing C: make executions so cheap and so common that even if they don't deter, they stop reoffending. And if you decide that the worth of a human life isn't that big after all - or if you just don't bother to investigate the false positive rate - you don't have to worry about C. This is the route that a lot of dictatorships ended up going.
This is why I prefer a moral objection rather than a "practical" one. Because entirely practical arguments historically haven't stopped the practice.
I think rights are defined by law. If unborn babies had no rights in the eyes of the law, that would not be true (at least to me).
I don't think that's true, at least in the United States. The whole concept of "natural rights" in the Bill of Rights is that they exist prior to law and are recognised by law, not created by law, and that the law is always subject to being superseded by actual rights. Hence why you all had a revolution against your duly constituted legal monarch and felt justified in doing so, because you believed that the natural right of being born in a country was more important than some piece of paper saying that you were a subject. The Bill of Rights enumerates rights to clarify things, but only as an example, not as a limiting set.
But the US founding fathers did literally say "born", not "conceived", so the idea of an unborn person having rights seems like it would require reading a "penumbra" into the Constitution just like the "mother's right of privacy". It seems a logical extrapolation, but not quite derivable from the Constitution as written.
Abortion still seems squicky to me, as does the death penalty and the "right to bear guns" and corporate personhood. Where does that put me politically? Nowhere at home in either major US political wing, (so thank goodness I'm not an American).
Seriously, what's wrong with having a bunch of competing definitions?
Trying to link results from different scientific disciplines together to form a coherent scientific (or legal) argument would get awkward, I imagine.
But doing that would require some kind of globe-spanning computer network, and what are the odds of that ever being built?
recognizing that one can follow a good and righteous path without concern about where it is leading.
That kind of spirituality would seem to be at odds with the Nuremberg Defense, as well as a good chunk of common-sense law . Post WW2, the civilised Western world has at least technically held that having no concern about where your path is leading and what the results of your actions are going to be is the opposite of being good and righteous. And most ordinary people would agree.
"But your Honour, I was just following orders! I'm not responsible for what I was doing! I was merely being in the moment, living day to day like a blithe butterfly without weighting myself down with heavy moral debates about whether shooting civilians was 'moral' or 'immoral' by your ridiculous outdated code! It's not my place to know if those people I shot 'should' or 'shouldn't' have lived long or productive lives! To do so is arrogance and a fallacy! They merely lived, and then stopped living when my bullet entered their skull! It's all a beautiful circle of life! You should all just lighten up and get hip to the vibe, man! Live in the present moment and forget the fantasy of 'my past actions' as I already have. I'm actually the most spiritually enlightened one in this courtroom!"
Yeah, I don't see that argument really going very far.
Defining a function inline to your statement, and in that function performing evaluations in your return call that are based upon objects that may be null when you execute an operation on them?
Hmm? You've just described the essence of functional programming (anonymous closures returned by functions-as-evaluations). Perhaps you don't like FP or consider it strange, but I'm not sure you've made a case that functional programming is any less disciplined than imperative object-oriented programming, or less suited to large-scale programming. FP predated OOP as a programming style, after all, and it's based on a far more rigorous mathematical foundation (I'd be interested to see any clear widely-accepted definition of OOP at all, let alone a mathematical one!)
What was the time span from Madam Curie's work to commercial nuclear power?
About 50 years, depending on how you calculate it. Radium isolated by the Curies in 1906. First commercial power plant (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power#Origins) in Russia in 1954.
But note that the key theoretical idea, the fission chain reaction, surfaced via Szilard as early as 1933, and Fermi's reactor was 1941. So from the first glimmerings of a practical nuclear fission theory to a practical demonstration was less than a decade!
What's missing in the rest of theoretical physics is anything approaching a key insight like the fission chain reaction. We simply don't have anything that looks like it could be "scaled up" in energy output. The opposite seems to be the case - every tiny data point now requires vastly increased energy input.
Then there is this little thing called the world-wide-web invented by this guy Tim Burners-Lee to enable Particle Physics working at CERN to better collaborate.
Do these spin-offs count to CERN or Particle Physics net economic worth?
No, I really don't think they do. At least they shouldn't where science is concerned.
If you set out to do X, and pour millions of dollars into doing X, but in the end you fail at doing X, even if in the process you end up doing Y, it is still the case that doing X in itself was not a sensible goal. You would have been better and cheaper to just sit down and do Y from the beginning.
We might as well say that gathering giant multi-story piles of $10 banknotes into heaps and burning them is a worthwhile economic endeavour because doing it will teach us a lot about the science of paper folding, stacking and combustion. Or that spending all your income on the horse races will teach you a lot about the mathematics of probability. Yes, it will as a side effect.... but is it actually a sensible investment priority?
The sad fact appears to be that since the 1930s, high-energy and particle physics has delivered hugely disappointing diminishing returns. Especially compared to what was accomplished in the three decades before. The exotic particle zoo remains almost entirely a lab curiosity, fusion seems to constantly struggle with unexpected behaviour of plasma dynamics, fission can power steam engines but remains fundamentally unstable and toxic... while good old electromagnetics - QED at best, but mostly pre-QED Maxwell - keeps quietly delivering revolution after revolution.
Something is strange with this picture. Most of the really revolutionary pre-WW2 physics got done on a shoestring budget by today's standards. Seems like the massive amounts of government and military money that got poured into physics after the Manhattan Project didn't really lead to all that much. Certainly not to revolutions on the scale of the uranium and plutonium bombs. In retrospect, the H-bomb still seems like the pinnacle of the investment/return curve for "new physics". And that was in the 1950s. The big advances since then seem to mostly be materials science and industrial processes; impressive, but not theoretically ground-breaking. The theoretical "breakthroughs" since then like QCD seem sterile when it comes to actual applications outside of explaining what goes on inside a particle accelerator.
This is not what I expected when I learned about physics in high school in the 1980s. I was expecting a singularity-like curve of ever-increasing breakthroughs by the 2010s; instead we seem to have a curve of the opposite shape, generating quantitatively vast amounts more data, but qualitatively less interesting ideas. We're still just tinkering with variables in what's essentially a theory locked down in the 1930s.
Again, note that this is just an outsider's view of theoretical physics, not of science or industry as a whole. No doubt many of the theoretical advances since the 1930s look really exciting to insiders. But are they? The computer revolution seems to be an anomaly by comparison; I'm not sure a Moore's Law exists for theoretical physics.
To make that goal, these scientists should probably go on a retreat, spend some time on team building exercises, and practice dynamic solution strategies, so that they can build up the synergies they need to deliver agile, customer-facing world class results that deliver a genuine Six Sigma experience.
A customer-facing giant accelerated relativistic particle ray, eh? I like the cut of your jib!
Don't worry. The higgs exists. If it doesn't they will fabricate it. They have to because if they don't then they might have to finally reveal the truth.
That we've actually been secretly using the Black Mesa Lambda Complex dark fusion reactor to slingshot our teleport signals via a Xen relay in order to hide our illicit entanglement research from both the Nihilanth and the Combine? Pfft, everybody knows that. What you should be asking is, how come the Portal Storms and the Seven Hour War happened after Gordon and the G-Man gained control of the border world. Hmm?
4) Virtual reality
World of Warcraft.
5) Interstellar space travel
Voyagers 1 and 2. They're just veeeeery sloooow interstellar travel, and not flesh and blood travellers, but who says the galaxy has to play by human standards?
7) Star Trek Replicators
Paramount actually has one of these. It started off well, but accumulating single-bit errors in the Heisenberg compensators of the pattern buffers caused accelerated devolution, resulting in Voyager, Enterprise, and finally the JJ Abrams movie.
Due to industrial espionage from Lucasfilm, the technology is now in the hands of the wider Hollywood community, which is why we're seeing so many "reboots". If Gary Seven doesn't intervene, we project a 99% certainty that all new TV and movie properties in the year 2020 will involve lizard-men beating each other with rocks.
10) Proof that P = NP
Let N=1.
40% of the people in the world do not have sufficient IQ to understand the advanced Calculus like deferential equations.
They probably just don't have the right attitude of deference. It makes a huge difference.
invaded, replaced their government with a pupp...
A puppy government? Squeeee!
Do you realize that happiness makes you cry?
Do you realize that everyone you know someday will die?
Sorry, thought this was a Flaming Lips sing-along party. I'll go now.
The branch of the government that wanted to put computers on ballistic missiles. And on fighters and bombers. And on submarines. Etc.. etc... That branch isn't NASA.
True, and frighteningly often forgotten.
"The shiny Space Future: brought to you by the people who decided it would be cool to build thousands of flying robots that can melt cities into toxic slag. And hold them over your head, on a hair trigger, for the rest of your life. Mmm-hmm! Smell that, son? That there is 100% home-grown Apocalypse, and ain't she a beauty! Oh and by the way you also get a compu-tater in-tron-net or somesuch machine. I don't understand the specifics but the backroom boys say it's a way for you to chat to all your little friends and play wholesome patriotic war-games and steal movies. Heh. But don't worry, we'll throw you in jail if you even think of doing that last one. No, don't say a word. You can thank us by joining the Army when you grow up!"
"We choose to go to the moon! We choose to go to the moon in this decade, and do other .... things... to other, er, Things... with, ah, stuff.... for the purposes of - ahem - certain objectives.... tasking some rather particular, mmm, assets... about which which I'm not at liberty to comment further, and I'd appreciate it if you'd not repeat that last part. Heh heh. Good times. Anyone for coffee?"
What the Russians did was prove two things: that it was possible to fly round the Moon without disappearing into a black hole
Although if one of the Lunokhods had disappeared into a black hole in cislunar space that would have been pretty darn cool.
Without the lash of the Communist menace, Congress would not have spend trillions to shoot people into space.
Trillions? I'm sure it should only take a few thousand dollars to vacuum-adapt the firing pins of an M-16. The hard part would be working out what to do with the the recoil -
Oh, shoot people into space. My bad. Yeah, that part probably does cost trillions.
NASA says so, we've already found about 19 out of 20 NEO objects over 1km in diameter
"... but that last one's a doozy. Heh. Um. Sorry about that, folks."
My expectation (without real medical information) would be that bone, and muscle would be maintained by the body to a level adequate to support the excretion required.
I knew that life in space would be shitty, but I had no idea...
What you're suggesting would be like humanity deciding on December 18, 1903, to not bother trying to build any more tunnels to the lost Atlantean purple dinosaur babe paradise at the center of the earth until we could build one that can get out of the coal mines and is actually lava-proofed.
Edited for realistic comparison.
"But we can't quit the Sub-Atlantean Drill Project! Not now, when we're so close! We did one Mohole and never went back! How will mankind survive the coming Mole Men War without all the resources of Sub-Atlantea? Those foolish surface-dwellers simply can't comprehend the limitless resources of the hollow earth! I know it's all down there because I read it in a documentary pictorial magazine called Astounding Tales!"
If America closes its frontier completely and doesn't move out to the rest of the Solar System...
And there I think you've hit the nail on the head.
The reason America has both dreams and handwringing about space in the first place is that it still is living on dreams of a frontier - and on an economic system adapted to 500 years of exploitation of that frontier. But the frontier has long closed. And yet, the frontier-capitalist hyper-growth model - "there's always somewhere new to move to" - has now been exported to the rest of the world. That's a problem.
We can't solve this, realistically, by going back into space, because space just isn't an exploitable frontier in the same way that the Americas were 500 years ago. It might become such a frontier in the future, but we can't get there from here using the exploitative, expansive, unsustainable economic systems we currently have.
We'll have to build closed life-support ships-in-bottles to do long-duration spaceflight, and those are likely to be the exact opposite of frontier communities unless we have some kind of near-organic magitech, on the order of Star Trek's Genesis bomb, which can insta-smelt biospheres out of lunar regolith. And if we had that on Earth, we could make the deserts bloom and bring back the whales first.
The 'all eggs in one basket' argument is not about keeping alive the entire population of the Earth, it is simply an argument that we need to have a viable colony somewhere other than the Earth to prevent extinction. I agree that it is unlikely that our growth vs. environment problem will be solved by space industry/colonization.
But why would that colony not be vulnerable to exactly the same extinction event? War or plague will spread via space trade routes, and space colonies are more vulnerable to asteroid strikes than Earth is.
We've got trillions of years before that happened- look at how far technology has progressed in 1000 years- you think given such an unthinkable time available humanity would control the universe?
Yes, but there'd be a huge intergalactic standards war between Facespace, iVerse, the Googleplex Continuum, and Microsoft Pocket Dimension Two Billion and Twelve.
You know it to be true.
A generation ship makes sense after, and only after, life, in nearby settlements, is secured against the decline of the earth.
How could the Earth conceivably "decline" to be worse than Mars, let alone Venus or the Moon or an empty bottle carved from an asteroid?
Nuclear war wouldn't do it. Fossil fuel and aquifer depletion wouldn't do it. Multiple asteroid strikes couldn't do it.
The only thing I could imagine making the Earth a worse place than the rest of the solar system is someone deliberately erasing it with a localised black hole. Even if you just blew it into chunks the chunks would still be far more valuable than the asteroids.
You don't need to terraform to have a place to live. Multiple large vessels, freely orbiting and rotating to supply artificial gravity, would do nicely.
Multiple large greenhouses on Earth would do even nicer. You'd get oxygen and sunlight for free, and your bones wouldn't crack. Why do you want to be in space?