[Koromix]

Many / most people exisiting now also fail to grasp how bad the future will get on our current course. They fail to realize that modern life is anything but a short-term artefact of fossil fuel gluttonery (every person in the first world has uses the equivalent of 100 fossil fuel slaves. It's easy to mock human slavery when you can burn such a dense source of energy instead) and mild stable climate, both of which are likely to go very wrong this century.

The decision to put more weight on the present is mostly made in ignorance and wishful techno-optimism. Many people still think that we're somehow building a cheap-energy no-death space-faring future, or they're not thinking about it at all (though that does not stop them from making children). Going to space to escape the hard reality of life on earth and then never dying is basically the techno-optimist's replacement for the now outdated concept of heaven.

People on HN tend to go for techno-optimism. This is readily apparent when the AI, singularity delusion is treated as a grave and imminent civilizational problem but fossil fuel, energy shortage and climate change are dismissed with "PV will solve all of this. Evil greedy subsidy-loving coal and oil companies are the problem". Our fossil fuel powered civilization would quickly beg for these "evil" companies to resume their activity if they somehow decided to stop providing oil for a week.

Finally, this preference is also made at the expense of most of the wildlife and biodiversity that exists now (or not long ago for a significant chunk of it), which would very much like to continue exisiting too.