He seems to want to go to space for escapism reasons.
An asteroid will strike earth,so we need to insure our survival elsewhere.

However, we can also (and should do that instead) go to space to learn how to avoid an asteroid, destroy or divert it before it strikes earth. We can go to space to study other worlds in order to understand what is likely to happen to ours.
We learn from space ; escapism is much more like recreating elsewhere what we escaped from in the first place.

And we know the Earth will end one day. We will have evolved so much that our descendants won't be recognizable. Would we want them so badly to survive if we knew what they'd be up to?
We don't know.

Raoul