[anoncake]

> There are also other reasons. You can't learn about the possibility of life on other planets in Antartica, and seek to answer one of the greatest questions of all time: "are we alone?". You can't closely study another planet in Antartica. You can't be a brave new explorer seeing incredible places for the very first time in Antartica. There are far less new scientific and engineering challenges in Antartica whose solutions will greatly benefit everyone here on Earth. And so on.

That's an argument against research on Antarctica, but that's the one thing humans do there.

[dwaltrip]

The two aren't mutually exclusive. There are things that you can do in Antartica that wouldn't benefit from being done in space.

[anoncake]

For example, Antarctica is a great place to research Antarctica. And Mars is a great place to research Mars. For that reason alone, there will be people on Mars, even if there's nothing to commercially exploit there and no reason to colonize it.