Homo Sapiens may survive for 10 million years, but I don’t think that is where the smart money is.

I'll ask that guy, if I ever want to make a country as shit as possible for everyone but the rich.

Yeah, start terraforming other planets please... but don't use money to do it, I want the money. I'll give it to my friends instead, but please go terraform other planets for me.

"Libertarian": zero mention of the DoD budget.

DoE is responsible for maintaining american nukes, military is not having it

He wants to terraform planets with no spatial budget? What does he propose, sending a flask of germs with a trébuchet?

No, free market will solve it! SpaceX! (/s)

The issue is once you educate yourself in science and engineering, you realize that teraforming planets isn't something you just do. And you can't realistically rely on a technology that doesn't exist. The real problem here is one of education. The facts and the seriousness of climate change do not support his dumbass argument, and we'll all be dead by the time everyone comes to an agreement and realizes, oh shit nobody is going to save us from climate change but us.

You can easily be an environmentalist and still believe in the Star Trek paradigm. While we, that is mankind, might have the ingenuity to find technological solutions to most of our problems, we do not have the political or economic systems necessary to actually put these solutions into reality.

I've heard this phrased as Wizard vs Prophet

https://grist.org/politics/wizards-and-prophets-face-off-to-save-the-planet/

There’s also a fourth attitude. We live on a planet uniquely suited to the kind of life it gave rise to, such as ourselves. The climate of it before we began pumping tons and tons of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere was generally tolerable. Sometimes we had great periods like the medieval warm period and sometimes we had natural devastation like the little ice age. We’re in the process of going from bad to worse and if we don’t let up with our emissions soon we’re gonna have to get a lot better at every form of engineering really fucking fast

That's not true, that's simply what they want you to believe.

They know what they're doing, they know it's not in our interest, they play dumb and the uniparty marches on.

They can track down your money by smell, though

The only way humans' progeny will exist for millions of years is if we manage to make it through the great filter and spread out to other planets, assuming we can find planets suitable for open-environment habitation.

We're quite good at making more of ourselves than is sustainable, so the only way of keeping ourselves going that long is to spread out.

Of course by then I'm sure several new species of humans will have emerged.

Even if humans don't go extinct, surely untold masses will die from food shortages and disasters.

You're not wrong at all, humans won't go extinct. The alarming thing is all the other things which will go extinct or be reduced in number, and the change in water/soil/weather sources obviously. Biodiversity and not having your neighbourhood turned into a desert are pretty important things to like, not have life suck. Plus you know, having access to clean water... humans will keep growing in number (mainly in Africa, probably the opposite in the developed world and countries like China and India though), but in 50 years we'll all be living like wartorn Syrian children*

*I am not a climate scientist, nor do I have much actual knowledge on climate science, so I do not know which precise flavor of impoverished middle eastern we will become

It's Rand Paul. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_positions_of_Rand_Paul#Energy_and_the_environment

People are more than isolated tweets. He's a man who's made hundreds of public statements on climate change in the past, only one of which is contained in this tweet.

Then why does he think we need to create habitats on the moon or other planets? Just stay here if we can last for hundreds of millions of years. The Lord will provide, right?

That's not true. That's like saying "If we had refrigerators, we could keep food good forever". As you know, food in the fridge can still go bad, because no technology is perfect. I think that terraforming technology will be an extension of techniques we can use on earth today, like controlling emissions. And that saving earth from apocalypse is the best possible practice we could have for fixing other planets. There is no magic "fix everything" button. Even with the right technology, you still have to do the work. Today, we have the right technology to save Earth, and what determines the continued survival of the human species is whether it is capable of doing the work.