Can We Do It?

Elon Musk has gotten into a bit of a verbal dustup on Twitter in regards to the feasibility of terraforming Mars. A lot of his opponents seem to want to focus on the limits of the technologies we have available to us right now, while Musk is arguing that there's no reason to assume that what we have today represents the limits of the possible, and that in fact it's very probable that the very act of going out there will enable us to develop new technologies that we would never have dreamed of, had humanity remained earthbound.

Sometimes it seems like the naysayers actually want a future in which it's just too hard to go out there, so that humanity never strays outside the neatly bounded confines of the terrestrial sphere. Almost like they're afraid of a boundless future, as if it were somehow threatening to them that other people might decide to leave and seek other ways of living and being human, beyond their grasp.

These people feel very much like the people who were so excited about the Mundane SF Movement, or who, when presented with an anthology centering around a cheap and easy to build ftl drive, immediately focused on all the negatives, all the things that would make it hard or impossible for ordinary people to make and use one, effectively defeating the entire point of the anthology.