Daniel, going to space for the sake of curiosity isn't indeed the same thing as going to space to get away from Earth. There is a political divide, here!
For instance, while a few find the terraforming idea interesting in Europe, a huge majority simply rejects the idea.
I'm afraid our civilization will have to one day terraform a world, but it will have to be our own, the Earth.

*** Well I don't recall Europe funding any manned space missions so that's a tautology. It takes a frontier mentality to get enthused about space colonization. I'm not sure that the US still has it. Some do. Hopefully enough. Given private enterprise, it only takes a few. Enabling technologies mentioned later.

It's also helpful to look at history: the settlers who left Europe for the Americas were escaping from religious persecutions in Europe.
But now, americans from the US are far more religious than the Europeans who in the mean time had known the French revolution.

*** Yet religious freedom is high in the US. Lots less anti-semetic attacks than in enlightened Europe.

If there is a human behavior going against the interest of our own civilization on Earth, we have to accept changing our habits ourselves instead of re-creating elsewhere what we escaped from.

We change all the time, that's our cultural evolution. It goes far faster than our biological evolution. We change but we haven't yet build a city underneath the ocean nor on the highest mountains or the remotest deserts. There is still plenty of room for mankind on our own planet.
Other planets need to be visited (we need serious improvements in the spacesuit technology), explored but settlements, if ever, much later...When humans will become unrecognizable to us.

*** I agree about cultural evolution, although I disagree that it will be a long while before we colonize other worlds. I see a confluence of nanotech, robotics and biological re-engineering as enabling a late 21st century start of 'human' colonization of Mars, the asteroids and beyond. It won't look like the twentieth century visualitions of space exploration though.

-p