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You can’t separate “colonizing space” from a kind of frontier, Wild West fantasy. That’s why it captured the imagination of Americans in particular to such an extent. Life on the homestead, on Mars - it even has desert, just the like the real Wild West! You only need to draw a very large dome over the ranch and add some solar panels, and there you have it, ten acres for every family. (Setting up a self-sufficient homestead is not even particularly expensive in the modern US if you’re not picky about location and willing to work very very hard, so one wonders why so few of these fantasists seem to do it!)
Of course in reality it’s all bullshit, space colonization is one of the greatest wastes of resources imaginable. Unless or until the technology is developed to quickly travel to other solar systems with planets that might actually support life, there is no reason to settle space - it won’t stop x-risk (as @self_made_human suggests, most sources of x-risk would also affect a Martian colony) and even a nuked, irradiated earth would be easier for humans to live on than Mars. The other planets in our solar system are immeasurably worse than earth in every way for life. Terraforming would take thousands or tens of thousands of years with technology we can scarcely imagine. And with the human population likely to peak in the next century anyway, there are no pressing Malthusian concerns for humanity, earth will still be pretty empty even with 10 billion humans. Any resource gathering or scientific work that one might need to do in space can be done by robots/probes/AI in tandem, there is no need for humans to be out there at all.
I'm not opposed to NASA, planting the US flag on Mars might well be justified from a national pride perspective, or because of technology invented along the way. But let's not fool ourselves that colonizing space, in and of itself, is the solution to any of humanity's major challenges.
In the 10 seconds it took you to type this, over 10^21 kWh of Sol's sunlight was lost to humanity forever. That's $10 million trillion, at cheaper than wholesale energy prices; that's a hundred millennia of current world GDP.
Develop a bolder imagination.
If you read my comment I say that resource extraction in space (presumably including sunlight) might well be justified, but that this can be handled by robots, and does not require people living in space.
Were you picturing the resources all being used on Earth? Spread among a Dyson cloud of colonies, that much energy is a nice standard of living for quadrillions of people. Concentrated on Earth the waste heat would vaporize us.
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It's a lot easier to get the resources to people when the people are in space too, I assume.
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So where would you do that? In the continental US, you can't escape the Sword of Damocles of a something-studies graduate coming along and saying that your homestead is built on stolen Indian land, or the law school graduate coming along and finding some tax code or ADA regulation that you can get extorted over, and nowhere on Earth can you escape the environmentalist arrogating to himself the right to regulate how you eat and heat and breathe lest your sinful vapours sully the planet. Sure, these events might be unlikely/trifling/easily worked around, and it's not like space is without its perils. I'm still sure that a big part of the visceral appeal of the frontier is the idea that you can actually escape this and go somewhere where nobody can argue that you owe them anything, because many people's psychology is such that losing their house to unfeeling nature is bearable in a way in which losing their house to a smug and self-righteous sentient being is not; and conversely a large amount of the opposition to it seems to me to be carried by lazy rationalisation (wasteful! won't help you against the gamma ray burst anyway! why don't you start in the deep sea!) for what is really a visceral aversion against the same (because there is no greater hubris than plotting to escape the great web of obligations).
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Man does not live on bread alone. Space colonization is and always has been about presenting a compelling vision of the future, stretching our capability, captivating our imagination and giving the human race hope. That's the best reason I can think of to do anything.
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I've heard much shorter time spans suggested for terraforming Mars, on the order of a century or two. That would involve cometary bombardment to restore surface oceans, which would be mildly inconvenient for anyone on the surface.
Other reasonable candidates include Venus (reversing the greenhouse effect), or Europa (living in one ocean is much the same as any other).
Still bad ideas, when orbital living is far more convenient, especially when you're doing ISRU off asteroids.
We're on track for 10/11 billion people with business as usual forecasting. That is almost certainly not going to happen, things will go either very well or very poorly.
I strongly expect that AGI will bypass the physical and memetic restrictions on population growth we currently face, in a world of artificial wombs, robot nannies and so on, children will cease to be the same timesinks they are today, and that will likely emancipate us from concerns about biological clocks and women not having as many kids as they claim to want.
Further, if we're immensely richer too, and I don't see how we couldn't be, we can have as many kids as we like, without compromising QOL.
That's completely ignoring things like mind uploading, which renders population growth largely a function of energy availability.
Look at today. Now we have billionaires, and I remember back in the day when a millionaire was a big deal. Now a million is only routine money (for a certain subset of people). National budgets are hitting trillions. We are immensely rich already.
And yet.
There are a lot of poor people still. There are a lot of people working good jobs who are still "I can't afford two kids" or "I don't know where the money goes, I'm not a spendthrift, and yet prices are going up and it's harder to pay the bills". Now owning a house, never mind having as many kids as you like, is the impossible dream.
Why should The Future be any different? The rich get richer, some of that trickles down, and the rest of us keep on going. The irony being, I think if you compared a middle-class family today with one from a hundred years ago, today's family is way richer and has more material goods and a higher standard of living - but which of the two of them can afford more children, you tell me.
Except poor people have more children than rich people, at least until the very high end of the income distribution.
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Inflation means that's a million doesn't mean what it used to.
There are a lot fewer poor people around. Humanity has indeed become incredibly rich, and poverty rates have plummeted.
The problem you mention is largely that of psychology, because humans have raised more children on less in the past, and still do so in most of the world.
The same reason some person on welfare in the US today leads a better life than most medieval peasants or even Victorian gentry. They have electricity, healthcare that works, cars and the like.
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As Jesus said, "For you have the poor with you always". Poverty isn't a measure of absolute wealth but a measure of relative wealth. Taking some measures of absolute poverty the number of people in extreme poverty (under a real $2.15/day has dropped from over 2 billion to under 600 million people). There will never beaffordable positional goods for everyone, because as soon as construction ended many of the people would only value the ones not near themselves.
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