I think you're reading too deep into the article. I didn't sense any left or right leaning politics, a purely scientific article that seems to be excited at the prospect. A catastrophic event doesn't have to be something directly damaging to the human race like the earth cooking, meteors and all that junk. There could be, for whatever reason an EMP that wipes out tech nearly all over the planet. I think that's quite far fetched but possible, if we have an established colony on mars that has been there for a few decades, is it's own society in it's own right, they could jump start the USA by simply sending necessary tech that would otherwise be lost or take a massive time to repair without certain technologies in the first place. Let's say that we actually do end up in enough wars that we end up nuking everything, most of the human race is dead, the land is ravaged and major portions of our technology is wiped from the earth. We are effectively set back over a century in tech and because any form of structure of government was likely wiped out it would be a long time before we got back on the track of progress.
But if there's a self sustaining, developed colony on the moon and/or mars. Nothing would be lost. All of the human race's technological might would have been spared from our very own stupidity. The colonies would help in restoring civilization on earth and albeit much smaller, which may not be a bad thing in itself the human race would continue upon the march to progress. Honestly, I don't think we're in any danger of a nuclear war anymore. Everything is so global now, all first world countries depend on each other to some degree economically and relations among the first world in general are improving instead of getting worse.
That with the advent of technology, culminating to a paradigm shift in the near future the human race will likely become incapable of killing themselves with everything becoming so decentralized. Computers are becoming embedded in everything and eventually will be embedded with us as well. The knowledge held within the internet can't be defeated by destruction of the world, it's a given that somewhere in the world there will always be a computer containing valuable bits of information and i'm sure there are groups out there who actively work to preserve the knowledge of the human race. Sort of like an Alexandrian Library except it is something that can never be destroyed or is at least incredibly unlikely to suffer from destruction.
