My working inquiry question is will we ever colonize another planet?

I am interested in
this topic for a number of reasons. Eventually our sun will swallow the earth, and while this won't
happen for millions of years, if we are not off by this point then our whole species will die. This
idea brings me to an even bigger point. What is our purpose on earth? Are we supposed to be a
space faring species that colonizes the universe? Or are we destined to stay on earth forever.
Ultimately I believe that we should strive to have a higher purpose in life than to just sit on this
planet until we use up all of its resources and die out. I would like to see humans as a species
become more ambitious in an attempt to colonize other planets and prolong our existence. We
cannot be certain how long we will be able to stay on this planet. Our best case scenario would
be the one I mentioned above, which is a couple million or billion years I believe (I will research
this later) which gives us plenty of time to develop the technology and have the time to escape
the ticking time bomb that is our sun. However, there are many other things that could force the
destruction of our planet, or the uninhabitability of it. These are things such as nuclear warfare,
an asteroid hurtling towards us, the effects of manmade climate change, and probably many
others. These are events that could happen tomorrow, a year from now, a hundred years from
now, or hopefully never. The point is, life on earth is not guaranteed, and if we are destined to
achieve something greater than just earth, we need to ensure that we are in the able position to
do so. I am curious about this topic because I spend a lot of time wondering what will happen
after I die. As grim as it sounds, I can’t help thinking this way, and this idea of space exploration
is one of the avenues I often go down. The assumptions I am making and have made are that
we as a species want to eventually leave earth, that earth will not last forever, and that
humankind does not want to be destined to go extinct. Most of the research I have already done
has just been youtube videos that I have watched that I have been fascinated by. This hasn’t led
to me donig any hardcore research about the feasibility of colonizing another planet or space
exploration. I am certain that there is a lot of research on this topic, so I will probably start by
doing google searches, followed by google scholar searches. Some potential issues with data
collection that I anticipate is that there is not a lot of actual instances of us trying to colonize
another planet, as far as I’m aware. Yes, we have been to the moon but in terms of actually
laying the groundwork to colonize another planet, we have not really ever dealt with something
like that. The outcome I’d like to see is that I will hopefully have some peace of mind about the
future of our species, and have some interesting ideas and theories about how we will
eventually go about colonizing another planet.