~37 compared to 15-20 being normal.

15-20 was normal for the 100 years ending 40-50 years ago. But of we look at the last 40 years or so, the CAPE has been higher, suggesting that we don't know how what "normal" looks like going forward. More people are buying stocks than ever before due to retirement plans and poor bond yields, which pushes up the PE.

So whether ~40 is high for a PE going forward isn't clear. The CAPE hit ~45 in the 2000 crash, and reverted to ~20 after the crash, yet the 2008 crash only hit ~26 and crashed down to ~14 and quickly bounced back to ~20. The 2008 had little to do with CAPE and more to do with corruption in the banking industry, whereas 2000 was almost purely oversized hype in the burgeoning tech market.

So is the normal range 20-30? Idk. Maybe 20 is actually low going forward, it's unclear. Either way, 40 isn't as outlandish as it was in the 2000s, and that pushed up to 45 before crashing.

there is a strong likelihood we are seeing a bubble.

Agreed. But if you drop out of the market and invest in other stuff, you would miss whatever the rest of the runup will do before it bursts, which could leave you worse off than someone just investing in the entire market by market cap. Ot could continue to run for 10-20 years, or it could pop this year, it's impossible to know since it relies heavily on investors continuing to believe the hype and companies continuing to have something to back up that hype.

Settling mars is a centuries long undertaking. You basically have to nurture a whole ecosystem from scratch... that would be a brutally difficult and lengthy process in the best of conditions. But of course, these aren't the best conditions. We aren't doing particularly well with the ecosystem we've already got.

If you want a historical project, then look to balancing modern industry within the planet's biosphere. It's a prerequisite to anything happening on mars.

There is no good economic reason to colonize other planets. We have plenty of space here on earth, with conditions already much more hospitable than that of mars - deserts, for example. The resources needed to turn these into habitable land is so much less than the resources required to make even a tiny part of Mars inhabitable (i.e. establish a colony that relies on life support systems) it's insane to go for Mars first. The reason colonizing Mars is talked about at all is because a rich white dude wants to go to Mars, since deserts are too boring for his spoiled ass.

I actually agree that it would be cool if we went to Mars, not to colonize it but just to be there. But comparing it to white pillaging of the Americas is just incorrect. Mars is not inhabitable by humans, the Americas very much were. The external resources needed to colonize America were zero, in fact pillaging local lands meant a lot of resources for the Empire. Mars is going to be a much more expensive and much less profitable endeavor.

Actually I replied to you before, pointing out the very same fallacy: https://lemmy.ml/post/33824723/20134917

Europeans caused massive death in the Americas. I do not think we should replicate that model.

Also, the chance is small, but there might have been a separate biogenesis (beginning of life) on Mars. Sending humans with our dirty microbiome would almost certainly wipe any evidence of that, and possibly cause an extinction of an entirely separate form of life, which would be a crime even more horrible than the extinctions and genocides which we have caused so far.

Let's just leave Mars alone until we've studies it more and are certain there is no life. Colonizing the moon seems challenging enough for a couple centuries....