Like, we’re destroying the one place we know is a sure bet on where we can prosper if we keep it healthy, but instead the world’s richest man is trying to expand to other planets while this one’s ability to sustain life is in jeopardy. IMO that makes us potentially a very stupid species compared to a species that doesn’t really care about meeting other aliens because they value the life on their own planet far more than we do.
I get the hype about traveling to and living on Mars/Luna/Space Stations, I think. It’s that most people are not dedicated to understanding it, they just see cool scifi/scifantasy settings. Star Trek finding neat planets everywhere and some hot women, Star Wars being full of cooperative lifeforms and beautiful high tech worlds, Guardians of the Galaxy slinging through another rainbow nebula with a killer Playlist, and Stargate bringing us to beautiful British Columbian pine forests every week. Even stellar dramas and tragedies all follow the one successful main character(s) that survives, thrives, and entertains us even in the worst of situations. Interstellar, The Martian, Ad Astra, Mission to Mars, The Red Planet, Space Cowboys, Total Recall, Project Hail Mary, and Gravity come to mind.
The key thing, to me, is that all of this feels like someone else already made the situation survivable and the person can always return home. Mars is “right there” in solar system terms. And so often, even when a dire earthly situation is what triggered the movie events in the first place, they tend to be solved by time the protagonist returns. There’s no ultimate feeling of loss. It all works out. And I think that’s the extent of thought by the gen pop when it comes to space travel. It’s survivable and earth is always fixable, because SomeoneElse^TM made it work.
I play a game called Elite: Dangerous. I’m currently 20,000 lightyears from home. It’s lonely and empty. For reference, I could make it to a large colony (Colonia, for the 3 ED players) in about 2 hours of game play and make it back to Earth in probably 8. But I don’t do that because I want to scan and search each system I jump to, looking for valuable plant life and valuable planets to scan. 90% of the time there’s nothing of value. Thats a lot of time looking into an empty bag. And even when I do find something, it’s often a long flight to the POI. I generally enjoy it for being a calm game out “in the black”, but I absolutely get space madness like Tommy Lee Jones’ character in Ad Astra. I keep looking and keep finding nothing. The irony there being one of the movie’s “extrasolar planets” was just a normal picture of enceladus, a local moon. The game has many planets that look similar. Nothing! Nothing here! Nothing there!
We are not representative of the common understanding of stellar travel. It looks cool, but you and I know nothing about it will be cool from a living experience. All that’s cool is knowing the first people out will provide a ton of feedback to improve the next trip. The next trip, performed by someone else, as the trips will be one-way death sentences for quite some time to come.