You’re not wrong.
Moderns prefer science fiction to science because mathematics underpins all science and that’s much to tough for our current gaggle of political assholery to grasp.
Speaking of scientific rigor, the core reason the environmental fanatics hold sway is because the average person couldn’t grasp a scientific fact if it jumped out and bit him on the ass.
Consider that earth is at least 4,500,000,000 years of age and that planetary motion, seasonality and weather, growth patterns; among other natural phenomena; have been cyclical over this time period. As such, any change in our climate is both part of a recurring pattern and normal.
Since the best guesstimate on our part of the age of the universe is something less than 14 billion years, the implication is that the impetus for this cycle came from elsewhere (he argues that the Big Bang came several billion years in to this cycle), and thus, argues for the existence of multiverses.
The problem with most all the responses on this thread (they are all good comments, by the way) is that all the thinking is being done in 4 dimensions.
If we're ever going to solve the problems of intergalactic space travel, be it through FTL travel or some other means, we have to think outside of the box.
Just because we have the restraints of relativity before us doesn't mean we can't find ways around it, or even through it.
My point, which will doubtless be roundly criticized on this board (and possibly elsewhere!) is that since it is a problem, and since it's out there, it is something that begs for a solution. That is what mankind ever seeks - solving the unsolvable. It is inherent in his basic nature.
Great minds spawn great things. Although these great minds are not present in great numbers, we have to move past the urgings of the Luddites to feed our own, for example, before exploring Mars.
If mankind demurs and decides to solve all our problems at home before embarking on things like exotic space travel, we will never get off this Earth, and eventually we'll all perish on it.
We have been semi-literate in the sciences for what? - something over a hundred years? In the vastness of time and space, why couldn't a civilization of sentient beings, in whatever form, have solved the problem over millennia (or however long it takes)?
Just because we can't do it now does not preclude the possibility we'll be able to do it in the future.
CA....