The voyager record is a message in a bottle cast into the cosmic ocean.
One [path] is that we stay on Earth forever and then there will be an inevitable extinction event. The alternative is to become a space faring civilization, and a multi-planetary species.
Every time humanity moves into a new domain—the oceans or the air or space—we go, ‘Wow, this is enormous and really empty, we can throw as much garbage here as we want, and it’ll never fill up, right?’ Then pretty soon we go, ‘Oops, that wasn’t quite true.’ And we’re reaching that point in space.