We’re gonna become extinct. That’s a given. Average life-span of a species is about a million years. And we’re the kind of species that destabilizes its own habitat and hastens its march toward extinction. Extinction happens to every species; we’re no exception.
Mars is really really hard. Apollo, I think, gives people a false sense of what’s possible. The longest Apollo mission was 12 days. Mars is a minimum of 3 years. Low-earth space stations are a totally different beast than a Mars mission would be. The ISS has 930 cubic meters of pressurized volume–the Apollo CM had 6. And any Mars mission is gonna lean more toward Apollo than the ISS. The ISS is only 250 miles up, and is constantly resupplied. Any Mars mission has to take everything it needs for the 120 million mile, 8-10 month outbound journey (assuming supplies are pre-staged on and orbiting Mars for the stay and return.) That’s all the water, food and air recycling supplies for all of the humans going on the trip. We’ve never done on-orbit refueling. We’ve never spun up a habitat for gravity nor tested human response to significant Coriolis forces. The MSL had a precision landing on Mars’s surface–it targeted an ellipse 11 miles x 5 miles. So any pre-staged supplies/habitats/etc would have to be gathered from an area about that size. We don’t have a plan for radiation, which is a major problem. An SPE during transit could easily wipe out the crew. Etc, etc. We’re not going to Mars.