Never call someone a massive asshole, call them massless.

We don’t know yet if humanity will succeed. And you are absolutely right : my proposition here is quite forced and incomplete. Yet, if we consider a broader perspective : on many planets, similar to the Earth, there must be somewhere, at some moment, a sentient species succeeding in something like this.

Let’s look at humanity as natures’ invention that could protect the Earth against total destruction of life from huge meteorites : in this context, our actual partial destruction of the biosphere (and of 99.99%? of our civilisations) is not so important.