Should you go to Mars? ft Bill Nye

I read Robert Heinlein's "Farmer in the Sky" when I was a kid. I'm attracted to the idea of planetary colonization because I'm not afraid of hard work, I love the ideas of exploration and a challenge for all humans. I feel that humans need a frontier, an external challenge, to realize our better natures. When we look inward, we pick at each other like crows, when we look outward, we soar like doves. 

Also, there's the whole "eggs in one basket" idea. I don't think it's conceivable that we'll map enough near earth asteroids and comets to be able to prevent another K-Pg type event. 

I don't think we're that good at planning ahead for rare catastrophic events, and what has saved us in the past from large natural disasters is that the impact of the event is local, perhaps affecting a quartersphere, allowing help to flow in from unaffected areas. A single large meteor impact will end all human life, and a medium impact big enough to spawn a climate cooling event will probably end modern civilization. 

A viable colony in space or another planetary body could carry our civilization forward. There's decent evidence that the entire human species died down to a few hundred or thousand individuals during the Pleistocene, so a colony of a few thousand technologically advanced humans could eventually rebuild civilization.

If we never plan for it, if we never think about it, we'll be just like the dinosaurs someday.  It may take a while to go to the planets, and maybe the stars, but that doesn't mean it's not worth doing.