For every problem, there are specific solutions that address the immediate obstacle, and meta-solutions that incorporate the very nature of the problem into future approaches. At the furthest extremes, the specific is a simple negation of the individual occurrence of the problem - if you run into an obstacle, turn around and go back the other way - while the meta is a pure evolutionary algorithm, virtually a definition of life: When obstacles are encountered, iterate in all directions and default to the pathway with greatest energy profit / least net loss. Where the future of humanity is concerned, the ultimate specific solution to our problems is equally simple and pointless (extinction), and a multitude of possible beginnings lead to this same, singular end. The ultimate meta-solution, however, though it contains an infinite number of unknowable futures, begins in just one direction: Up.
What are the Top 10 problems that face humanity? Unless your answer contains "Humanity itself" - in which case the problem is your misanthropy rather than anything wrong with the species - the meta-solution is invariably an expansion of the resources, environments, physical volume, and cultural/economic/genetic diversity of the species. Just for the sake of demonstration, here is one plausible list:
1. Unsustainable energy
2. Climate change / environmental degradation
3. Nuclear weapons
4. Water shortage
5. Food shortage
6. Lack of economic opportunity
7. Disease
8. Corruption
9. Oppression
10. Political instability
But looking at this list, we find that these problems are interrelated in many ways: Political instability arises from corruption, oppression, and lack of economic opportunity, so there is no point in treating it as a separate phenomenon. Likewise, corruption is usually a result of public servants being underpaid, which is itself caused by a general lack of economic opportunity in society, so that too can be regarded as a secondary consequence. Additionally, most disease that occurs in the world is easily preventable or, if acquired, treatable, but because of shortages in both the quantity and quality of water and food, as well as basic lack of economic opportunity, human health is often compromised.
With respect to oppression, we can say that while it is conceptually separate from lack of economic opportunity, it is in practice the same: To deny freedom is to deny opportunity, and vice-versa. China, for instance, has done a lot to illustrate the differences between political freedom and economic opportunity, but has in the process also proven that they are inextricably linked. A poor man with nothing can only relate to a government in very simple terms: Obey, or revolt. With money, the repertoire of options expands dramatically, and increases the complexity of the relationship in the individual's favor - black markets and subcultures flourish in the face of increasingly untenable attempts to control them. The only way a government can reverse the process is to rescind the economic opportunities they had created, QED.
1. Unsustainable energy
2. Climate change / environmental degradation
3. Nuclear weapons
4. Water shortage
5. Food shortage
6. Lack of economic opportunity
7. Disease
8. Corruption
9. Oppression
10. Political instability
The new list then becomes this:
1. Unsustainable energy
2. Climate change / environmental degradation
3. Nuclear weapons
4. Water shortage
5. Food shortage
6. Lack of economic opportunity
So now is a good time to begin asking for deeper explanations of these problems. What does "economic opportunity" even mean? Civilizations throughout history have tried to create it for themselves, and more often crashed and burned in the process than they prospered. An economy may pour money into generating tourism, but even if successful their prosperity is always tenuous because they are entirely dependent on someone else having the disposable income to spend on them. They may exhaust themselves in an obsessive, almost fetishistic quest for gold or other material commodities (e.g., oil), only to collapse because they had neglected the very engines of their economy in service to what was merely a medium of exchange.
Economics, quite simply, boils down to thermodynamics: The flow of energy. It becomes horribly complicated up close due to the mind-numbingly vast combinatorics of biochemistry and resultant human psychology, but the overall picture is the same as for everything else in the universe - energy moving along the path of least resistance toward equilibrium. If there is a water fountain upstairs, and another one downstairs, you are statistically going to choose the latter because the energy cost is lower for the same reward. But suppose the fountain upstairs doesn't serve water - suppose it serves Red Bull laced with cocaine: In that situation, people would probably choose the upstairs fountain even if it were several floors away: Because of the energy reward, the upstairs fountain is economically closer than the downstairs one, even if it is physically further away and costs more to reach.
Economic opportunity, then, is having enough available energy to walk up those stairs the first time and find that second fountain. It is a state of taught disequilibrium: The presence of significantly more energy than is needed to sustain the status quo, leading to a change in the status quo. Unlike having a surplus of a material good, like food or water, energy surplus does not just sit there until acted upon - it causes change by its mere existence. Because there is more energy, there is eventually more available water - previously uneconomical sources of water become feasible (e.g., aquifers that were once too deep, or too saline, or too metallic) - and with both more energy and water, there is more food. With more energy, food, and water, there is more everything else: All domains of economic activity increase.
Our list can now be further reduced:
1. Unsustainable energy
2. Climate change / environmental degradation
3. Nuclear weapons
4. Water shortage
5. Food shortage
6. Lack of economic opportunity
We have finally hit on three fundamental, irreducible problems: Energy, the consequences of energy on our environment, and the possibility of violent annihilation (which would include, at lower probability, asteroid or cometary impacts). None of these is subordinate to the others - even with fully sustainable, zero-emissions energy generation, we will still be radiating waste heat at wavelengths that are progressively trapped by the atmosphere, and the amount of that heat will increase over time as civilization grows and complexifies. And even without strong economic, military, or political incentive for nuclear weapons, nations will still acquire them as status symbols and bargaining chips, leaving the door open for accidents, conspiracies, and misunderstandings.
Humanity can solve its energy problems easily enough without much outside-the-box thinking: It is purely a matter of time before our energy infrastructure is 100% sustainable, and only an additional matter of time before the output of that infrastructure comes to greatly exceed our needs. The only kink in that process to date has been storage, but making better batteries is hardly the stuff of Manhattan or Apollo Projects - we'll get there without much in the way of Nobel Prize-level work being necessary. And with that new energy, water, food, and economic opportunity in general will probably be addressed more thoroughly than we imagine today.
However, we will still be contending with the cascading environmental consequences of the energy we are dumping into the atmosphere, and the increasing proportion of the Earth's surface dominated by human habitat and its byproducts. The Anthropocene epoch is not something we can manage intelligently until economic and technological decisions are actively coordinated (not merely discussed diplomatically) on a global level, and the prospects for that are limited without an external perspective: It would always be easier to just make buildings sturdier against wind, dig deeper into the ground, move further from the coast, etc. than to fundamentally change the outlook of civilizations and make intelligent policy on such a scale.
But the same is not true if humanity's idea of itself has been extended beyond the confines of the problem, and we are able to see it from both a physical and psychological distance. There would be no European Union if Europe were the only inhabited continent, because its nations would be unable to appreciate and build on their similarities without the backdrop of global societies with far less in common. The same goes for the United States, if our territory were the whole of human civilization. It really, in fact, goes for anything that would exist in a vacuum as a unified whole. Even individual human minds can fragment when isolated too long. We alleviate our problems by talking to others, and obstacles that had seemed insurmountable turn out to be manageable once we have the benefit of their perspective.
Astronauts and even pilots of high-altitude aircraft have described what is known as the Overview Effect - an almost spiritual sense of detachment from, and greater appreciation for Earth as a whole. Such reverence is certainly one of the benefits of humanity moving out into space, but it isn't the whole story: Ultimately, our species has to understand in a matter-of-fact, intuitive way that Earth is not the only place - that it is one of an unimaginable multitude of environments, and (for now) the one most comfortably attuned to our needs.
This planet cannot be our toilet any longer, but neither can it be treated like some sacred, precious, untouchable flower that would collapse under the slightest human meddling: We must have the self-awareness to exercise care and caution, and the courage to take responsibility for shaping the ultimate state of the Anthropocene epoch. That will only come with the external perspective of a humanity that no longer regards this planet as its sole lifegiver and eternal home.
From that vantage point, we will have both the psychological and physical tools to deal with the challenge, in addition to having greatly reduced the potential consequences of failure. We would be merely working to rescue our oldest and greatest home, rather than huddling with an apocalyptic cloud over our heads while nature turned bitter around us. And that is why we would succeed: Because no one would have to ask what the point is. No one asks what the point is of putting out a house on fire, because the task is obviously manageable compared to the resources and experience that are available; but when confronted by a wildfire out of control, people may lose heart and wonder if there is any purpose in trying to stop it.
Confronted with a problem on a global scale, many people just sink into themselves and ignore it, defaulting to fatalism rather than endure the fear of losing the only existence they can conceive of. But the rules change when Earth is a great place rather than the only place - saving it becomes an actual goal, rather than a despairing slogan. Who am I to think I can save the planet? I'm just one among billions. But maybe I can help save a planet- itself just one among billions - if I've seen a few others up close and personal, and understand without personal fear or mystical adulation why it's worth saving.
This will do the same thing for the nuclear problem that it does for climate - provide both the perspective to deal with it, and eliminate the starkest potential consequences of failure. With humanity proliferating outward beyond the ability of academics to document, tossing around mile-wide asteroids the way tugboats haul cargo, what would be the prestige or the advantage of some terrestrial regional power having nuclear weapons? All the Big Boys would have colonies, client states, and allies out in the solar system feeding them resources and new technologies - disputes on Earth would not seem as interesting as they once were, and much less financially or politically rewarding for the kind of bastards who are usually responsible for them. I think our world would become boring in the Wagnerian sense, although probably still full of Byzantine intrigue.
But even if - through a string of perplexing, seemingly illogical events - a world of utopian economies and thereby stable governments, with distant scenes of action and exploration attracting all the dreamers and adrenaline addicts offworld; even if this society still produced enough nuclear weapons to cause catastrophe and then used them, Earth would be cleaned up and repopulated within a few generations by its diaspora. An Earth covered in plutonium soot would still be a dozen times easier to live on than the next easiest environment in the solar system, and any society shaped and born under those harsh circumstances would simply treat the terrestrial catastrophe as an opportunity for carpetbagging. The same would be true of a devastating asteroid impact, in the unlikely event that it occurred as a surprise and thus failed to be diverted.
In fact, let's imagine the distant time when the period of sustainable expansion in Earth's terrestrial resource base has ended: When the oceans are no longer enough water to sustain whatever it is people are doing; when the sunlight reaching the Earth's surface is no longer enough energy; when the metals in the crust have been dispersed into the "Anthroposphere" of human habitation, recycled endlessly, and finally are not enough. When the machines are as efficient as we know how to make them, and we recycle to the utter extent of our capability, what then? Does human evolution and history stop at this point? Do we attain equilibrium, stagnate, and decline?
That is what would happen if we remained a one-planet species, but it's merely another transition point in the case of a spacefaring one - the point at which terrestrial demand for space-based solar power, volatiles (i.e., water ice), and metals collides with the latent potential of the infrastructure settlements that already exist at that point. Wealth would flow outward explosively, even as resources flowed inward to meet the demand of consumption, and that would create...drumroll...economic opportunity offworld.
Once you are collecting solar energy in space, there are only two fundamental limits to the growth of that infrastructure, either of which would be mind-blowing to imagine humanity actually running into: The total output of the Sun, and the total availability of raw material in the solar system with which to build collector technology. Obviously it's more complicated than that, but that is the gist of the matter - once we have space-based solar power, and once the entire economic chain involved in its manufacture is itself space-based, the economy of scale has no practical limit. The bigger such an infrastructure becomes, the cheaper it is to expand even further.
From there, we go wherever we want: Humanity grows in all directions, extending itself in filaments along the least-energy gravitational pathways of the solar system and collecting in pools on the surfaces of massed bodies (planets, moons, and asteroids). We grow, diversify, and interact in complex and unimagined ways. The process iterates and expands in scope without limit. That is the infinite future of infinite diversity in infinite combinations (the Vulcan "IDIC"), but it begins in a single direction: Up.
It's depressing how often people ignore Up. More often than not, they only build Up as a way to make or conserve money, and even visionary architects who build jaw-dropping skyscrapers don't care about actually opening vertical space to people - the insides of the buildings look pretty much the same as much smaller structures; the height is pure ornamentation, and isn't used except as a rent-increasing window view. One gets a sense that most people would prefer the third dimension didn't even exist, and they only use it when there's no other choice - to hop over or duck under something.
So I get why people believe things and hold attitudes that presume the Earth and its material limits are fundamental to the human condition, even though humans have walked on another world and brought rocks back from it. Everything outside "the" world isn't real to them - just a 2-dimensional picture glued to the surface of the sphere of Fixed Stars that revolves around the Earth. And this needs to change, for the sake not only of humanity's material future, but its sanity: Reality has to be bigger than one planet. However vast, however diverse, however inexhaustible its wonders, one planet is not enough for a technological species with lightspeed global communications.
We need more. We need the challenge of sights our brains did not evolve to understand - alien sunrises, Earthrises, amorphous asteroids rotating on multiple axes, Saturn hanging overhead bigger than the human imagination can endure. We need all the things and experiences that our evolution thus far has not yet exposed us to: The sub-gravity environments, the availability of weightlessness, the naked stars in an infinite black sky. We need to learn how to survive and flourish in hells of fire and ice, in vacuum and in roiling atmospheric cauldrons, so that we truly know our garden world and how to protect it. So that life continues to grow and change. So that all the trials and tribulations of human history were not in vain.
This is the mission of all life, and the coming stages in that mission are the most important since life crawled out of the sea on to land. From Sputnik to today, and however long the road ahead leads, all who have been alive to see the slow illumination of that road and the growing definition of the possibilities at its horizon are privileged. There is nothing more progressive, and will never be anything more progressive than this - the hardest, most dangerous, most beautiful, and broadest road into an infinite and unknowable future of limitless potential.