Many say that we should skip terraforming and jump straight to disassembling the planetary bodies for raw material with which to construct a Dyson swarm of solar power collectors and O'Neill cylinders.

I do not like this idea. It would do great and irreversible spiritual damage to mankind to destroy the wandering gods that have populated our skies since long before the species was born. The justification for such a settlement strategy - maximum solar energy, maximum inhabitable surface area - is indistinguishable from the minmaxing mindset that has led us to convert our civilization's material culture to a homogeneous sprawling blob of McMansion subdivisions, condo towers, strip malls, distribution warehouses, parking lots, freeways, industrial monocrops, factory farms... The thought that we might continue this pattern in space on a vastly larger scale, turning the solar system into the cosmic equivalent of a Bangladeshi tenement crowded with eighteen gorillion hominoids living under Malthusian scarcity due to eventual exhaustion of available resources, is nearly as nauseating to me as the prospect that civilization will sputter out and leave us confined forever to the Earth. Or maybe not, maybe 'civilization' expands from there and does the same thing to every other star in the Galaxy, like a plague that eats stars.

Much of the spiritual malaise of our age is because we have turned our eyes from beauty. Beauty can't be measured, it doesn't fit on a spreadsheet, so it doesn't exist at the corporate level. One of the defining characteristics of the cosmos is that it produces beauty in nearly infinite variety. Every natural landscape is beautiful in its own way, seen with the right eyes. Biological life invariably multiplies that natural beauty. Intelligence can go either way: it can produce incredible beauty when it works in partnership with nature, and it can produce abominations when it paves over nature.

People say we must go to space to become wealthy. What is the point of wealth without beauty? Or they say we must go to preserve conscious life in the universe. Again, what is the point of consciousness, if not to serve as the witness of beauty? Beauty may not be the only thing of importance, but without it life ceases to be life and becomes mere existence. We should go to space not just to enrich ourselves or to preserve ourselves, but with the intention of working in partnership with the universe to render it more beautiful.

I think such a motivation will provide much greater to impetus to exploration and settlement in the long run, because again, what's the point of interstellar expansion? Is it just feeding an insatiable appetite as we try to outrun the heat death of the universe by converting every available kilogram of it to human biomass? There's no way to win that game.

We should make ourselves the gardeners of worlds, not their destroyers.