Authors like this one previously also wrote poorly aged hit pieces like "Why not across the oceans", "Why not to the skies" and "Why not to space".
And one man's snark is another man's sense of humor, humanity's grandest venture so far would be to learn to live in peace and to evenly spread our wealth, not to manage to hop to another planet and die there. And as dismissals come this one is anything but shallow, in fact, it's deeper than it needed to be.
I won't live that long but in case I do I hope you're right.
So I believe that there is an argument to make that insanely expensive, hard, and pretty much useless engineering projects (w.r.t. solving the biodiversity problem, which is actually about survival on Earth) could possibly be questioned.
Some will say that "if you don't spend all that money into inhabited space exploration, you won't necessarily spend it wisely. But I would disagree there: we should really start spending money (and fossil fuels) wisely because we are running out of time.
Criticism is good! Let the best ideas prevail.