Expanding into space has been a dream of scifi since before the genre had a name. Adventure, overcrowding, the chance of green-skinned women - the reasons are manifold but the idea is always the same, because the need to advance and prosper in new locations is fundamental to our species. The fact it's usually because we ruined the last place (or we don't like the people who live there) is best ignored.
There are many largely unaddressed questions, both moral and practical that have not been presented alongside the space colonization platform. It's called "reality" and it's not nearly as rosy as the dream.
Astrophysicists and cosmologists around the globe seem to be in agreement that life on Earth is fragile and bereft with risks. Scientists like Dr. J. Richard Gott, a professor of astrophysics at Princeton who says we should get a colony up and running on Mars within 46 years, and men like Stephen Hawking, who is a well known space colonization advocate, may be absolutely right about the risks, but are they right about the solution?
Then there is the other argument—that we don't even need a planet at all. Dave Brody of the National Space Society says "orbiting colonies" are the way to go.
"Just because you evolved on a planet does not necessitate that you continue to live on one. And there are some profoundly good reasons not to do so. Like that big honkin' 'gravity well' that you have to expensively and dangerously blast your way up out of each time you need to go someplace. And the bigger the planet, the worse the penalty."
Maybe Brody is onto something, but the same logic can be applied to this idea as to colonizing Mars—long-term sustainability with no parent planet with vast resources to send reinforcements makes the likelihood of this being a long-term solution quite slim. Also, with both of these plans there would have to be some serious population control.
A really interesting aspect of colonization will be whether we can really get over ourselves enough to do it properly - or whether our existing stupidities will be enough to stop it. Once the Moon and Mars open up it could be the New World, Australia and most of human history all over again - though this time without the inconvenient natives.
But it doesn't have to be that way. The incredible expense involved in space travel (partly because every superpower insists on having to re-invent each other's wheels) acts as a filter for how many countries can make it at a time. The vast areas available on each near-Earth object mean we could probably avoid conflict for a few generations (unless something inconveniently useful or expensive turned up).
Some nations have already agreed that acting on their own is not smart, with the European Space Agency acting as a group effort among dozens of nations. We could hope that ESA, RSA, ISO, JAXA and NASA could similarly get over themselves and pool their efforts. We could also hope that we evolve into energy beings and teleport off the planet. There's something so frustratingly stupidly limiting about getting off world, beyond the very gravitational attraction of our origin world, and still doing it as rival groups groups. On the other hand the competition spurs development far faster than otherwise possible (though sometimes far too fast, as with the original Moon program).
It's a reminder that we're not even a Type I civilization - on the old Kardashev scale, a Type I civilization was the lowest rank on the interstellar ladder, a group who had harnessed the entire energy output of one planet. We don't. We waste massive quantities of the energy we have to cancel out other huge fractions of the same energy wasted by other groups.
That's another reason for the scifi obsession with getting off-Earth, we suppose. Imagining a world where we band together and achieve something incredible. (Or at the very least, we make the effort to be equally stupid somewhere awesomer).
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