Hedging Our Bets

It used to be more of a point of mine in the past, but I've always had a notion that the ultimate human goal is to escape earth. Evolutionarily, it makes sense - we want lots of populations to evolve in different places and to safeguard our species for perpetuity, or at least until we reach some cosmic singularity. So I'm a big fan of Warren Ellis' latest post on colonizing Mars. The bit that intrigued me (found via R Stevens) is here:

And while I did indeed just say that no kind of extinction is good, it should also be pointed out that giving up a bolthole for human breeding pairs — which are, make no mistake, the stakes on a Martian colonisation drive — on the basis that we might kill something less substantial and self-aware than a cough is no way to run a railroad.