No. For one thing that analogy is pretty flawed. Our biosphere doesn’t crash every month or so. It doesn’t at all. To crash means to make Earth uninhabitable to humans. Even if 96% of Earth’s species went extinct somehow, you can pretty much guarantee that some of that remaining 4% would be edible to versatile omnivores like ourselves that have the ability to cultivate food, cook, light fires, use clothes to stay warm, make boats to travel wherever we want to go on the sea, etc etc. And whatever happens we have air to breathe, atmospheric pressure just right, temperature just right, liquid water, protection from UV light and ionizing radiation, …

Mars is just not any kind of a “new world”. It’s got no atmosphere to speak of to start with. Can you imagine setting out on a boat to America and when you land there, unless you have a fully pressurized spacesuit, you die? And that you can’t go outside your habitat without one? A spacesuit that costs $10 million to build and often needs repairing and eventually needs to be replaced.

Then you can only live in habitats that cost goodness knows how much to build and transport to Mars, that also have a finite life like your spacesuit, perhaps a few decades if you are lucky before the whole thing needs to be replaced (at least judging by all our space habitats to date). Also to stay alive even in the habitat, you need elaborate life support to not just supply oxygen but also scrub out carbon dioxide (which is going to kill you if it gets above 1%), and hydrogen sulfide, sulfur dioxide and other nasties that can build up in a habitat with no ventilation. Of course you can’t just open a window to let out stale or even poisonous air.

Elon Musk says, sell your house, and if you can get half a million dollars from the proceeds, he’ll be able to transport you to Mars. Perhaps he may achieve that goal, it’s hard to say yet. But if he does, he’s surely not going to pay the hundreds of millions of dollars per “colonist” to buy you a house on Mars or even the ten million dollars for a spacesuit, nor supply you with provisions from Earth, in that budget. So what can you do there without a house or a spacesuit?

There you are on a planet without a breathable atmosphere, with solar storms and cosmic radiation, and where even in the tropics it gets so cold at night, 100 nights of the two Earth year long year that carbon dioxide freezes out as dry ice. Its morning frosts may look quite Earth like until you realize that they mean that at night it got colder than dry ice.

Frosts on Mars - this photograph from Viking 2. Mildly enhanced to bring out the colour of the frost. But this is not like Earth frosts. It does contain water ice but it’s also mixed with dry ice and though the water ice will last longest in the sunlight in daytime the frosts can’t form in this region of Mars without dry ice.

The frosts form when the air gets cold enough to condense out as dry ice, taking water vapour with it.

The Martian night is bitterly cold, even in the tropics.

Dust storms that block out 99% of the sun for weeks on end.

How is it going to give humans a better chance of survival to try and set up home on such a desolate spot which requires such immensely expensive technology just to stay alive?

What we need to do is to protect and sustain our Earth. It’s the only place we know of in our solar system that is so habitable to us. There is no conceivable future disaster that could make Earth as inhospitable to life as Mars.

They wave hands and show artist’s impressions of a terraformed Mars, but nobody knows if that is possible, and the most optimistic estimates are a thousand years to get to a carbon dioxide atmosphere that possibly might support trees if you can make Mars warm enough. But you’d need to use vast quantities of artificial greenhouse gases pumped into the atmosphere (cubic kilometers of fluorite ore mined every century, and 500 power stations running continuously just to supply the electricity to make the greenhouse gases), or planet sized mirrors to keep it warm enough.

The atmosphere would still be poisonous to humans. Even if it was Earth pressure somehow (with very optimistic assumptions about vast reserves of carbon dioxide that haven’t been detected yet deep below the ground) then you couldn’t just use an oxygen mask, like the climbers on Mount Everest. Just 1% of carbon dioxide would kill you. So you need an oxygen / nitrogen mixture in a closed cycle breathing system, even on that “terraformed Mars” after a thousand years of terraforming.

That’s the “easy way” making optimistic projections about the amount of carbon dioxide there.

It’s even more “hand waving” projections to suppose that eventually we could get some facsimile of an Earth atmosphere there. If they use photosynthesis, Chris McKay estimates, 100,000 years to fix the carbon dioxide into a meters thick layer of organics for oxygen, and then you need even more greenhouse gases to keep it warm because a copy of Earth’s atmosphere would be far too cold for Mars without extra help. But what if it goes in some unexpected direction, build ups of methane or hydrogen sulfide, or sulfur dioxide? It’s hard enough to just shift the amount of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere by parts per billion. Imagine trying to adjust to compensate for something that went wrong in the atmospheric composition of Mars when you try to terraform it.

It’s a fun idea, it’s great that these scientists are exploring it. As pure research, who knows where it might lead. It may help us understand exoplanets, help us to design smaller scale enclosed habitats, help us better understand how our own Earth works. But it is not remotely practical at present. There is much to go wrong in this plan. And what government or collaboration of governments is likely to sustain a project like that, probably costing trillions a year, for a thousand years? We have trouble keeping up a government plan for a few decades. And the “colonists” in such harsh difficult conditions are not going to be able to do it without extensive support from Earth.

As for backing up knowledge, yes, we could do that outside of Earth. But the best place to do that is on the Moon. Close at hand, we could even build a radiotransmitter there that could be interrogated from Earth by a civilization that has lost its space technology. Very stable, no weather to speak of, no storms, bury it deep down and it is protected from all except the worst impacts too. It’s an ideal place for a seed vault too, permanently kept cold at ideal temperatures to preserve viability of the seeds. If you want a backup ,do it on the Moon. Perhaps with a small population of caretakers. Backup on the Moon - seed banks, libraries, and a small colony

But not of humans, there’s nothing going to make us extinct except voluntary extinction, probably. There are many things we could do to make Earth less habitable for humans than it is. But nothing we could do to make it anything like as uninhabitable as Mars. We simply don’t have the technology at present to do that. With any of the suggested disasters for Earth, ask yourself, could it result in an Earth that would be less habitable than Mars?

It would be far far easier to inhabit such an Earth than Mars. You can breathe the air, live in non pressurized houses, go outside without a spacesuit, etc etc.

We are amongst the least endangered of all the creatures on Earth. But we can help prevent some of the others of Earth’s creatures going extinct. And we can help protect and preserve Earth for ourselves also.