I hate to be all sci-fi geek, but there was an episode of Farscape that was pretty cool. Crichton said that unless the planet stopped arguing amongst themselves and worked together, they would be ripe pickings for the Scarans.

Now I know that's kind of lame, but think about it. What are we going to do if something happens to the sun? I know it won't be in our lifetimes, but what about future lifetimes? What are we going to do if we don't have room for everyone? Or if we can't feed everyone? Or god forbid we have an all-out nuclear war, and the planet becomes inhabitable. We need to be applying science towards the survival of mankind. All great civilizations have peaked and then fallen shortly thereafter. I say we take a page from history and start planning for what's next.