So Paul, we've discussed quite in depth the, I guess, more destructive aspects of colonisation and how that has impacted specifically Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples in the past. But I want to know why are we now talking about colonisation again? Okay, so let me try and make the case in favour of colonisation. It sounds like a rather strange thing to be doing this day and age, but let me give it a go. I guess there are three main arguments for colonising the solar system. One argument is the Safe Haven argument. One is the social innovation argument and the third is the large population argument. So if you start with the Safe Haven argument, the basic idea is that life on earth is perhaps a bit fragile. There's a quite respectable chance that humanity could die out in the next few thousand years. It could be something we do to ourselves, like a nuclear war or biological warfare or rampant climate change making the earth uninhabitable or it could be something done to us externally, like some giant solar flare or huge volcanic eruptions or a new pandemic or one of these giant meteorite strikes. So we've talked about though, admittedly, we concluded that likelihood of that is not very great. So all of these disasters, they could happen on another planet other than earth, right? Yes, that's right. But I guess the hope here is that they wouldn't happen on all the different planets at the same time. Of course, Mars is just as likely to be hit by a meteorite as the earth is, probably just as likely to destroy ourselves on Mars as we are on earth. But the idea would be maybe it wouldn't happen at the same time. So for example, we have a colony on Mars and that gets wiped up maybe Earth will survive and then recolonise Mars and then maybe when Earth has a catastrophe of a thousand years later, Mars will survive and then can recolonise the remains of Earth. So by having different planets well separated, maybe we're just making ourselves a bit more resilient and a bit safer against disasters. So I can see a bit of a drawback with this potentially. If we have a planet B, if we have another option that we can just go to, what's stopping us from ignoring the problems that we face here on Earth like climate change, for example, if we have another planet that say the billionaires, the politicians can go to, what does that mean for saving Earth? Yes, this could be a major problem that if we have a second option, people will not maybe fight us hard to preserve this beautiful Earth that we're on here. This is a real problem. I don't know how to assess how much funissue it is. My feeling is maybe we should be doing both. We should be fighting as hard as we can to preserve the Earth and we should look as a backup plan. I think the Earth is such a precious thing that people are going to fight pretty hard for it even if they can escape. But I could be wrong. It could be that there's plenty of politicians and billionaires that will happily just flee somewhere else and leave the Earth to go to pieces. Okay, you make some really good points there. What about the second argument? Okay, so my second argument is social innovation. Traditionally, colonies have often been places where new social ideas have been tried out. The mother country may become very conservative, but the colony, because things are new, can do things a bit differently. I'm thinking, for example, of the United States, which is the first real country to play with government that's not run by a king, unlike the places that settled it. Australia was the first country in New Zealand, the first countries to give votes to women and votes to many working class people. And these are things that are much harder to do in a long established culture. I could imagine, for example, that the Earth might become even more conservative. For example, it could well be that biological advances are going to mean that people's lifespans have come enormously extended. Just imagine what the world's going to be like if none of the rich people ever die. The dictators and the billionaires live forever and don't want to take any risks. Also in the future, we might have perfect totalitarian technology. Already now, you can have microphones and smartphones that record everything that everybody says and fed through artificial intelligence. So you could imagine some dictator who's going to live forever with a perfect artificial intelligence induced totalitarian state. So Earth could be totally locked down and there's no future to change here. And in that case, a colony somewhere else might be the only chance for innovation or to make things better, to live freely in the world. I think the reason why many call us to originally move, for example, United States, was to escape from these sort of tyrannies in the old by the countries. What is to say that if we do have this other planet that has all these other resources for us to take advantage of, that we won't be perpetuating the same racial and financial inequalities that we see here taking place on Earth? Of course, it could be that the colonies will be worse than the Earth than are a plenty of historical examples of this. Or it could be that some evil, everlasting dictator uses the resources say of the astray, built to oppress better on Earth, much like the British Empire used the resources of India to conquer numerous other countries. So yes, you're quite right, it could just make everything worse. But we don't really know, do we? We don't. Paul, what is your third argument? Well, the third argument is about human population. And we've got one, seven or eight billion people on Earth today. And we really couldn't make it say ten times, well, we couldn't have a hundred billion or a thousand billion people on Earth without having a horrible standard living or living in new shoe boxes and eating pap, the environment, the water resources, the injuries also, you just can't tolerate these populations. So if we want to have a much larger human population, say a thousand billion people, we're going to have to go into space. And there are plenty of resources in the solar system to have populations even much larger than that. Now, if you believe the utilitarian school of philosophy, they said what you're trying to aim at is the greatest good for the greatest number. So if you really could have a hundred times the Earth's current population but all living good lives on maybe artificial habitats in the asteroid belt or something like this, according to the utilitarian philosophers, that's got to be a good thing, right? More people having a good life. More people having love affairs and writing poetry and doing all the things they might want to do. Increasing population is not necessarily a bad thing and it's certainly something very difficult and morally interesting, whether you can actually put limitations on population size. Of course, this is the one philosophy, the idea that more people is good, but there are many other philosophies, for example, a more religious or a more spiritual philosophy that might say that filling the universe of humans is maybe not the best thing we should be doing. Maybe we can keep a small, boutique population and then leave the rest of the system as a wilderness for us to explore and appreciate rather than thinking, there's a rock, we better colonise even more people. It all depends what you think is right and wrong and that's a pretty deep question. Yeah, I have a very long question to answer as well. I think, regardless of whether we are looking at space colonisation or not, we only have a lot of problems that we're trying to tackle here on Earth, including population size. So for me, I think it's really a matter of possibly changing how we do things and potentially looking at a new way of conducting exploration that focuses less on the taking but more on living in symbiosis with the environments that we find ourselves in. Yes, I mean, all these arguments we've made with all these come to fruition, well, it could be heaven or it could be hell, it could go really badly. One could imagine spreading through the solar system with some sort of, rather than there's plenty of horrible science-diction things out there where totalitarian, evil, polluter, destroy the entire solar system, I could also make it more optimistic point of view. Maybe you one could imagine us spreading through the solar system, putting more people but also looking after the environments and maybe even bringing some of these barren places to life and flourishing. It could be really good, it could be really bad and try to work at which is going to happen in the history, suggests it's a bad thing. Are you an optimist or a pessimist on this? I think I'm definitely an optimist and I think we have to be right. We have to have hope in, you know, in humanity and in our future, I personally believe that humanity are capable of incredible things, incredible innovation and also a lot of compassion. So I'm optimistic. I'm hoping that a lot of the nasty things humans do because of lack of resources. And if we had the almost unlimited resource to the solar system, maybe that will mean that humans would actually behave a bit better. One could always hope so.