Alternative to space travel

We all know sooner or later, we are going to run out of resources and space on this one planet we live on. (1x)

This is primarily the reason why Elon Musk started SpaceX — to make inter-planetary travel possible so that half of us can become Martians — thereby roughly doubling resources and real estate available to humans. (2x)

But since everything is relative, why can’t we make the Earth relatively bigger, by genetically shrinking ourselves over time? Say if we genetically engineer our species to make humans a foot long on average, that’ll itself be quite a thing. (5x)

If we can shrink our species till we are as small as bacteria, but only super intelligent bacteria, we can fit in a lot more of micro-humans on this one planet. (10⁶x)

Or if you wish, take it to its extreme — shrink the species till we are reducible to a few electrons buzzing around in data centers, and you’ve made earth pretty big. That’s exactly what Elon’s other investments — OpenAI and Neuralink are trying to do! (10⁹x?)

Heck, if all of us are mere electrons buzzing around in a data center, that data center doesn’t even need to be on Earth — it could be floating in space once it gets built, as long as it has an energy source, say a nearby star, to run it. This is how you eliminate the need of planets altogether. (∞)

Now this space data center is our new home. It’s our only home. We happily revolve around our nearby star and get energy from it. But we have no way to abandon this data center matrix floating in space since we are mere thoughts trapped in it. (1x)

Nor is there a need to.