re: What is the deal with colonizing Mars?

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But why the desire to colonize the planet? Elon Musk (and others) talks about it as if his goal is to setup a new civilization there.

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Umm, yeah, that's the goal. It's to save us from extinction as a species and to further our horizons. Mars will probably be a terraformed planet that we can fully live on by the end of the millinium, so long as we don't nuke each other to death.

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Do certain extreme climate changers think that the Earth is going to become uninhabitable in the next 100 years or something? In the event that the Earth warms (or cools) to the point that certain existing areas of the world will be very difficult to live in, I get that various populations will face hardship, mass death events and likely wars over resources. But that is more mankind fighting over the available land versus the Earth itself becoming no longer hospitable to life.

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It's possible we'll make it somewhat uninhabitable over the next 100 years, but by the end of it, we should be a Type I Civilization to where we should be able to reverse it. Why not have another planet that we turn around?

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So I get the exploration idea behind it, but I am curious about the long term goals here. I would think the Moon would be far more manageable a process if the goal was setting up a colony off Earth to protect against extinction.

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The Moon can't be possibly terraformed though, and if something particually catostrophic happens on Eath, the Moon will be directly affected as well. We certainly need a Moon Base, but a Mars civilization will ensure the future of the species, not the Moon.