[horsawlarway]

Why, though?

It seems to me that the long term payoff of colonizing Mars is huge.

The long term payoff of colonizing remote and inhospitable areas on earth is many, many orders of magnitude lower.

I can maybe rationalize that effort if we simply assume that those areas are similar enough to Mars that the experience and technology developed while doing it could be applied effectively.

But I'm not really convinced that most of that experience will transfer - The requirements to make a self-sustaining ocean colony or artic colony are wildly different from the tools and experience we'll need for Mars. At best we gain some general insights, but we'd still have to spend enormous resources developing the right tech and tools for Mars.

[AnIdiotOnTheNet]

The payoff for Mars is, I think, overrated. The payoff of learning how to colonize all kinds of different environments is more valuable, and it is easier to start with the ones close by than the one's so far away we've only ever sent probes.

Doing these things are still ludicrously ambitious projects, and yet colonizing Mars is at least an order of magnitude more ambitious.

[NohatCoder]

Experiments on Mars cost way more, and small mistakes are likely to destroy the whole colony. Anything we can learn on Earth is much easier to learn here.

[ceejayoz]

> Anything we can learn on Earth is much easier to learn here.

Not true for "is/was there life on other planets in the solar system".