For every cranky guy warning against "apparently theoretical problem which is not immediately affecfting our daily life", society will contain some other people who criticize the idea for being wasteful, or anticipating problems that won't occur, or won't have nearly the impact claimed, and will push back.
For some subset of the warnings, they are legitimate and represent rational response to rare, but impactful events. Identifying and planning for existential threats is something that successful societies do. Only extremely unlucky societies that fail to plan survive while those that do plan are statistically more likely to survive.
I don't think we exist in a time and place where if you say "we should multi-home humanity to solve the meteor problem" will lead to people spending trillions on mars bases, though.
For every cranky guy warning against "apparently theoretical problem which is not immediately affecfting our daily life", society will contain some other people who criticize the idea for being wasteful, or anticipating problems that won't occur, or won't have nearly the impact claimed, and will push back.
For some subset of the warnings, they are legitimate and represent rational response to rare, but impactful events. Identifying and planning for existential threats is something that successful societies do. Only extremely unlucky societies that fail to plan survive while those that do plan are statistically more likely to survive.
I don't think we exist in a time and place where if you say "we should multi-home humanity to solve the meteor problem" will lead to people spending trillions on mars bases, though.