"Ways we likely can't foresee now"? Try this: We can already foresee that we've only got about a billion years before the sun reaches its full intensity, a level that earthly life cannot survive - and that's to say nothing of 5 billion years down the road, when it becomes a red giant and just-shy-of-swallows Earth, or a few billion years after that when it expels most of its mass in a cosmic windstorm not even Jupiter will survive. If all of civilization, all of life as we know it, is even to MEAN anything, we need to aspire to the impossible. To put it mildly, we've got our work cut out for us.

Well said. Agree 100%.