Extinction events don't happen that often. Meanwhile the massive changes we've made to our environment (in a relatively small time frame) are having a serious impact on our ability to survive on this planet.
We don't need to "reduce our reliance on nature". We're always going to be subject to the influences of what environment we live inside of. Whether it be on planet-scale or otherwise. We don't exist in a vacuum.
Individual extinctions and extinction events are usual considered as different things. The former is commonplace, the latter rare and results in massive shifts.
> We're always going to be subject to the influences of what environment we live inside of.
Houses, heating, cooling make us resilient to outside temperature and weather changes, advanced construction makes us resilient to earthquakes, etc. etc.
There are people working on plans to colonise Mars - while that might not be viable in the short term - we are talking about making an environment without an atmosphere suitable for life - and there's no reason why this shouldn't be achievable. Reducing reliance on systems such as plants requiring bees for pollination should be trivial in comparison.
None of those things protect you from an extinction event.
I’m not sure why you think that plant pollination needs a new solution in the first place. We’ve been working with bees for centuries and we’ve used them as a tool. Bees are themselves an optimal method for pollination created though thousands of years of natural progress.
Colonizing Mars continues to be a pipe dream and even if/when people start living there it’s going to be full of compromises and discomfort. And we’ll still have billions of people stuck on earth.
Technology isn’t the solution to all of life’s problems.
Closed system biospheres on Earth have proved impossible to date. Mars is vastly less tractable.
Technological optimists have had a poor record over the past 50+ years. Infotech is the exception rather than the rule, and even it has encountered progressively formidable headwinds.
> Houses, heating, cooling make us resilient to outside temperature and weather changes
Heating and cooling necessarily heat the exterior of the heated or cooled environment more than they do heat or cool the interior. As the temperature warms, you need to cool your interior space even more, pumping yet more heat into the surrounds. For one, all that energy has to come from somewhere. For two, hopefully you don’t drive the system beyond a point where your heating and cooling can keep up.
> There are people working on plans to colonise Mars - while that might not be viable in the short term - we are talking about making an environment without an atmosphere suitable for life - and there's no reason why this shouldn't be achievable. Reducing reliance on systems such as plants requiring bees for pollination should be trivial in comparison.
There is a huge, vast, expansive, unimaginably large, ridiculously wide chasm between “working on plans to colonize Mars” and “actually colonizing Mars.” In the meantime, we’ve got ~10 billion people dependent on the existing ecosystem we’ve got here. Keeping that global ecosystem healthy enough to support those people without massive die-offs or total chaos, without the benefit of any globally organized effort to speak of, is deeply and profoundly not trivial, probably much less trivial than supporting a very small population on another planet.
Plus, even if we do manage to colonize another world without first learning how to maintain the one we have, what exactly is the end game? Hop from planet to planet, destroying any life we find or create along the way?
We don't need to "reduce our reliance on nature". We're always going to be subject to the influences of what environment we live inside of. Whether it be on planet-scale or otherwise. We don't exist in a vacuum.