Yup, we need to reach out to the stars, the argument that we need to focus only on improving life on Earth is ridiculous-if we improve productivity by say 30%, the population and/or consumption will just go up by 30% and we’ll be back where we started. Just look at our world today, is our destiny to create billions of consumers of pop culture and tasty food?

Also several other factors are important:

• At least some of these colonies will be underground (at least initially) and will be inherently more able to survive something like a Supernova or asteroid strike
• We will likely eventually create variations in genetically engineered humans to be more compatible with different environments. Or perhaps evolution will do it for us, maybe the increased radiation will increase mutation rates, a fraction of them good.
• The humans out there will probably be less interested in consuming pop culture vs being more resourceful, intelligent, etc
• We will probably have a wide variety of survival strategies and human variations, creating a more robust defense against life being wiped out
• A culture will develop emphasizing education, science, etc again over pop culture.

Given our innate desire to grow and expand we ultimately have no choice. We could also just create a virtual reality and live in there, which we’re already partly doing with “reality TV”, fake news, pop culture, so maybe that’s the way to go…at least for the majority of us. But evolution happens when a tiny percentage of the population takes a risk and tries something different.