Just found an interesting interview at CNN, with Iain M. Bank, science fiction author. Read it here or look below for a small excerpt from the interview. You can also watch the videos if you prefer.

CNN: Do you think humanity really has a future among the stars?

Iain M. Banks: Well, it’s there or nowhere. I think it’s insane to have the capacity to get off the planet and not use it. It’s still the case that we’ve got no real defense against meteors or comets or anything else hitting the planet. You’ve got all your eggs in one basket, all six, seven billion of us in the one place, and all potentially vulnerable to strike by something really big that’d wipe us all out. It just seems really daft, so yeah, why not?

It might take us longer than we hope: I come from that generation that feels quite put out that we don’t have square meals the size of Oxo cubes and we don’t have jet packs and free electricity and all the things we were promised — where’s our hovering cities and starships and moon bases and Mars bases, and so on — but I’m still optimistic, I still think we’ll get there.

But we’re making life difficult for ourselves at the moment, what with global warming and all the shenanigans associated with that. We’ll see; I do think we should keep on doing it. It would be great if we could spend less money on the military and a lot more on space exploration: divert funds to something worthwhile instead of developing new ways of killing one’s fellow human beings.