We don't know if there is no life there, we've never been.
Almost every time we've assumed that an environment on Earth was "too harsh" to sustain life we have been proven wrong. We have no model for something that might live on the surface of Venus or below, but there could be something in the clouds.
"The world wouldn’t be $78T richer, it would be $78T poorer because it would lead to widespread civil war"
Nope, 90% of people would stay where they are. Most people don't like migrating: to uproot yourself and your family from the land, culture and language you love is a big deal and people only do it when the have no other choice.
Okay and what about the migration of the other 700m people with most frequent destinations being US and Europe from the bottom quartile of countries by GDP?
Mexico has 125m people and the US has around 12m illegal aliens. Let’s generously assume that only half are from Mexico, that’s 5% of the population that was willing to take the risk to live in the US illegally. Now create an open boarder? You’d have 10% of Mexico moving to the US tomorrow. It’s human nature to want a better life and it’s also human nature to want to protect the life one already has.
But to get Patreons to fund them, they'd have to make exciting press releases. That's sort of what they're already doing - make Americans excited about it so they vote for politicians who continue to fund them. I'll bet there are already endeavors on Patreon that you're not funding because they haven't been promoted enough to sound very exciting.
