[tsimionescu]

I'm hoping this is a joke?

It did remind me of an off-topic pet peeve - it's absurd to start thinking of a colony on Mars before colonizing the Sahara and the Antarctic, both being orders of magnitude easier and more useful than a colony on Mars.

[antepodius]

Yeah. Until we've tiled the solar system with solar panels, fusion reactors, and people, we're not done with local growth. Of course, Earth's surface would be converted first, and you might want to treat that as an externality to be taxed and regulated (as we already do with national parks etc).