I'm glad we're not going into space

XKCD posted a comic lamenting the shutdown of the space program in the US.
The text says it all: "The universe is probably littered with the one-planet graves of cultures which made the sensible economic decision that there's no good reason to go into space--each discovered, studied, and remembered by the ones who made the irrational decision."

There's a lot of space out there. There's not that much "the earth". If we mess the earth up, there are actually no other places we can go. Space travel might be one of humankind's greatest feats if only because we're relative noobs at being an advanced species. 1000 years ago we thought that birds gave birth to trees. Think how much more we'll know in another 1000 years. Space is still going to be there 1000 years from now. Nothing's going to change, really. It'll still be an inhospitable vacuum full of radiation and cosmic dust and Major Tom.

Think of space travel as something which we were capable of doing, but which we weren't ready for just yet. Just like things like radioactivity, electric cars or manners. When these things first came out, they were awesome to behold, but we couldn't use them in the right ways. So we either forgot about them or used them in the wrong ways. They will have their rebirth, but not until we're ready.

I'd rather we turned the earth into a place that aliens would want to visit and not conquer. An intergalactic Switzerland. We need to focus on the planet we've got and not the one that's seven million light years away. By the time we get that far out, that planet might be gone. Let's focus on what we've got here instead and let those lucky lucky aliens judge us when they show up.

Hopefully, we'll have manners again when they do.