From Jeff Bezos’ conversation with Lex Fridman:

If you think about the good old days, they're mostly an illusion. Like, in almost every way, life is better for almost everyone today than it was, say, 50 years ago or 100 years ago. We live better lives, by and large, than our grandparents did and their grandparents did, and so on. And you can see that in global illiteracy rates, global poverty rates, global infant mortality rates, almost any metric you choose, we're better off than we used to be, and we get antibiotics and all kinds of life saving medical care and so on and so on. And there's one thing that is moving backwards and it's the natural world. So it is a fact that 500 years ago, preindustrial age, the natural world was pristine. It was incredible. And we have traded some of that pristine beauty for all of these other gifts that we have as an advanced society. And we can have both. But to do that we have to go to space. And all of this, really the most fundamental measure is energy usage per capita. And when you look at, you do want to continue to use more and more energy. It is going to make your life better in so many ways, but that's not compatible ultimately with living on a finite planet. And so we have to go out into the solar system.