subject. I have always been frustrated by people in media and crackpots like Musk and Bezos discussing space travel/colonization like it's taking a voyage across the Atlantic. It is a constant fight to get people to understand simple facts about time, distance, evolution of the universe etc. The first thing to always keep in mind is that the information our telescopes etc. are showing us is millions of light years old. That's not just a matter of distance but also time. The second thing is that we know just from our own planet and solar system that there are huge changes that happen over those time spans. Therefore even if you could go instantly to some other planet outside our solar system, seen by telescope or instrumentation, it may not even be there anymore or at least it is not likely to be in the configuration you think it might be. For example another way to think of this is that right now the light from the way Earth was billions of years ago is just now reaching that same planet people may be thinking to travel to for colonizing. Simply put when we look out very far we are seeing the was and not the is. In fact the object may have ceased to exist at all. Our time scale of a couple of thousand years of "mapping" the heavens, by the naked eye at first, then using telescopes/instruments to investigate and gather data is a tiny fraction of the time that light/information took to get to us. A couple thousand years is nothing in geologic time as our own Earth science research has shown.
Therefore our best course is to take care of our own planet. That is the most rational choice. We need to make major changes to do that and do them today.
= new reply since forum marked as read