The human race is a pigheaded delinquint with power. The kid that found dad’s gun. Its hallmarks will be pride and arrogance. Its clearest, most common deeds will be rape and pillage.
Its point of progress, if any, will be in the successful humility to believe that it deserves a partial if not full extinction. The sense of “deserve” being that its own goals of survival are irrational if it truly dreams of this “exploration.” Those stronger members will believe that we have no right to the cosmos by our native hands. Humans travelling space is as absurd as chimps flying in airplanes. The chimp is not the ideal to fly the airplane. Humans are not the ideal to travel space. This projected fantasy of exploration we see in our fiction, this vivid wet dream, is just the cookie jar whose forbiddance we can’t understand in our delinquent youth.
I wouldn’t bother to flesh out justification for this statement to appeal to the sceptic, whom is never quite satisfied. I simply believe that our hopes of proliferating the things we value on Earth will depend less on this awe of “human potential” and accepting that we are the middle-men to something better. Such a shift in our thinking is far from approach and seems hardly possible. People will put heavy faith in humanity, and on the same plight, in their own lives remind themselves that for their own health “I have to be an asshole to protect myself from all the assholes around me. I have to be an asshole to those I care about, to teach them to deal with assholes. I have to support war, to get rid of the assholes.” the alternative: The mythical ahimsa principal “I have to stand obvious to threats around me and hope for its pity.”
In a simpler, more directly productive view, we could be proud of our humility, a new ability in accepting our irrelevance as humans, and our potential to create something better. That our goals depend on our own subordination to our own creations. That our “children,” devised rather than randomly mutated, should outlive us as all children do with their parents in known nature. That we are a seed to bring about great things, but we ourselves need to die. A blip in cosmic time.