The difference is between "there's some humans living on mars, perhaps working towards self-sufficiency" and "we're moving everyone on earth to mars"

The word "planning" in the quote "with billionaires planning to move humanity to Mars in the near future" is a link to another article: https://aeon.co/essays/elon-musk-puts-his-case-for-a-multi-p...

The top of that article says, "Elon Musk argues that we must put a million people on Mars if we are to ensure that humanity has a future."

So the author is giving the exact explanation of what it means "to move humanity to Mars". It's a straw man to suggest that the article author intended it to mean "everyone on earth".

> The top of that article says, "Elon Musk argues that we must put a million people on Mars if we are to ensure that humanity has a future."

Having a tiny fraction of humanity on a different world, which is entirely dependent on shipments from home for the foreseeable future, is an irrelevance to the problems we're facing on Earth.

> Moreover, the whole justification for colonizing Mars is supposed to be if a disaster struck Earth. So in a sense you have moved all of humanity to Mars if humans on Earth go extinct.

Sure, but those disasters are entirely unrelated to any of the problems we're facing right now. Nobody is claiming Mars is a refuge from, say, man-made climate change. It could be a refuge from, say, a gamma-ray burst crossing Earth's orbit in half a million years.

> Having a tiny fraction of humanity on a different world, which is entirely dependent on shipments from home for the foreseeable future, is an irrelevance to the problems we're facing on Earth.

I agree. Which is why I think the fanciful idea of a Mars colony is nothing more than a hand-wavy distraction at this point, designed to propagandize a billionaire's other projects to gullible sci-fi enthusiasts.