Escapism can be a precursor to failure too. I'm not being cheeky. I think that we're not open enough about the fact that we're jumping ship, because we're not sure we can take care of this one. That's important, because it carries serious concerns for how well we'd do on Mars.
I see it not as escapism, but as steps to learn how to take care of a limited resource. Large-scale geoengineering will be necessary sooner or later on Earth. However, it almost certainly has failure modes that we don't know about, and won't know about until we can experiment with it. Testing the effects on Earth, with nearly 8 billion people, is wildly reckless. Testing the effects on Mars or Venus, though costlier to implement, has the advantage of not risking those 8 billion lives.
One thing to watch out for though, is that it's only half of the rationale behind escapism: we're concerned about our own stewardship of the Earth, but there's a very real concern that a disaster could happen to it that's not of our own making. An asteroid, for example.
Mars would protect us from several categories of these, and becoming multi-stellar would protect us from several more.
That was what i've always think as well. If theres a problem with our culture, that we keep passing through generations, we could even buy more time if we escape, but the problem might go with us.
If we dont fix the problem in the core before we colonize other planets, we will become a interplanetary virus working as a parasyte and killing our host with time.
Hedging is not a bad idea. We clearly have the resources for it. And to make matters worse, every day we are discovering something new about the instability we are wreaking upon this planet. Why on earth would you argue against hedging in the situation we are so badly ignorant we might see a planetary collapse within a minor variation sufficient to wipe us all out?
Fair. But I think there is a lot we can learn about sustainability and what humans really need by putting them on an empty planet with zero natural resources except the minerals in the ground and some frozen water.
Mars will build up to sustainability, while on earth we try to cut back to sustainability.
I think the idea of "jumping ships" is silly, this is technically impossible in the near future. But urgency of expanding existed long before any recent events. To survive we need to spread.
