> because real problems are always more complicated than simple, inspirational ideas
Colonizing another planet 'is' a real problem?
Also, if we can 'just fix Earth' tell us how we convince all nations to come together and sing Kumbaya, put aside our resource differences and disarm all nuclear missiles (I'm looking at you North Korea)
The point being made by GP is that there are very many reasons why modern civilization on Earth may be shortlived: climate change, biological war (or lab accident!), global thermonuclear war, economic failure modes, AI or AGI, large impact, etc. Fixing any one of these doesn't solve the same problem that redundancy would solve, and some of them require solving seemingly impossible coordination problems.
Colonizing another planet 'is' a real problem?
Also, if we can 'just fix Earth' tell us how we convince all nations to come together and sing Kumbaya, put aside our resource differences and disarm all nuclear missiles (I'm looking at you North Korea)