Carl Sagan on why we need to become a spacefaring species:
From the Sagan Series Facebook page.
Carl isn't the only person saying this; Stephen Hawking has been saying the same thing for years. Then, there's the comment from cartoonist / blogger XKCD:
"The universe is probably littered with the one-planet graves of cultures which made the sensible economic decision that there's no good reason to go into space--each discovered, studied, and remembered by the ones who made the irrational decision."
= new reply since forum marked as read
"I think if you double (NASA's) budget to a penny on the dollar, that's enough to take us in bold visions in a shorter time scale to Mars, visit asteroids, to study the status of all the planets. On Venus, for example, scientists have observed a "runaway greenhouse effect. I kind of want to know what happened there, because we're twirling knobs here on Earth without knowing the consequences of it."
"Today, Mars is bone-dry; it once had running water. Something bad happened there as well. Asteroids have us in our sight. The dinosaurs didn't have a space program, so they're not here to talk about this problem. We are, and we have the power to do something about it. I don't want to be the embarrassment of the galaxy, to have had the power to deflect an asteroid, and then not, and end up going extinct. We'd be the laughing stock of the aliens of the cosmos if that were the case."
