Mars is extremely hospitable to humans, compared to almost every other planet except Earth.
Mercury: tidal lock to Sun, heavy solar radiation and solar flares up close, complicated orbital movement, low gravity, basically no atmosphere. May be habitable underground in particular belts with reasonable temperatures.
Venus: a runaway greenhouse effect, metal-melting temperatures and colossal pressure on the surface, colossal never-clearing clouds, very strong winds, sulfur and chlorine abound in the atmosphere. Could be habitable using artificial islands floating in the upper atmosphere where the temperature and pressure are comfortable. At least the gravity is close to that on Earth.
Jupiter is not habitable by itself, just due to the very strong gravity. Various moons of Jupiter are all pretty cold (though some have liquid water under the surface), and at his distance from Sun, the amount of sunlight reaching them is rather small, even when reflected by the giant disc of Jupiter in the sky. It's cold, solar power in impractical, uranium and thorium are not apparently abundant.
Saturn: see Jupiter, only even farther and colder.
Neptune: see Jupiter, but even without serious moons.
Pluto / Charon binary: not even a planet. At this distance, Sun is but another star in the sky.
Compared to these, Mars, with its conditions that resemble Earths's polar regions over large swaths of the surface, acceptable distance from Sun, serious amounts of water (as ice), acceptable gravity, acceptable amounts of sunlight, and relative closeness to Earth looks not that bad at all, and basically the only practical candidate for an autonomous, self-sufficient world.
There is a price you have to pay to make a whole new planet your own. The choice of accessible celestial bodies is scarce, to say the least. A long-term colony, and by this a mean centuries and many locally born generations, will certainly uncover a large bunch of problems, and develop a number of adaptations, possibly including eventual genetic changes.
I had a similar reply to someone else: by the time we can adapt to live on Mars, decades away at best, traveling there will be the least of our worries. Glad to be proven wrong, of course.
Maybe we can try and terraform it in the meantime.
There is a decent chance that our present biological basis is not congruent with the future of humanity. Mind-extension into synthetic cognitive structures is not as far fetched as it seems- we already extend our consciousness using machines, albeit with a very poor interface.
It is foreseeable that we will come to understand the nature of sentience - after all, many simpler organisms exhibit sentience- and beyond that it seems to be a scaling problem, which are inherently tractable.
If we can improve the interface between biological computation and synthetic computation, it will likely become possible to extend sentience across that divide, barring some kind of spiritual phenomenon or “magic “.
If we don’t shoot ourselves in the foot too badly, it is foreseeable that we may make very substantial progress in this direction over the next century. Establishing a toehold on mars during that century will be a huge strategic advantage.
The problem with “people these days” is that almost no one thinks a multi decade project is worth doing. If everyone waits for the future to “arrive “, the future you end up with is just driven by quarterlies.
The most important accomplishments will be remembered for centuries. If you aren’t working on one in some capacity, what are you even doing with your life?
If we can pull off synthetic bodies for our consciousness, then by that time going to Mars will be a walk in the park.
But I think you underlined the issue of timelines. Yes we can technically go to Mars in only a few years, but people living there permanently is going to be beyond my lifetime. Unless some people are willing to drastically sacrifice their health.
It’s not so much synthetic bodies as synthetic brains. Once we can move into thermodynamic neural systems or something similar in effect, -anything- can be a body. You could be a spaceship, or a power plant, or an anthropoid robot. I would imagine that one would need enough sensory diversity to keep from going mad,
But I would imagine that corporeal flexibility would be one of the major perks.
There's an assumption in the question that we are going to Mars.
We aren't. It's the individuals who own the resources and money to implement space flight and Mars colonisation that are going to Mars. We don't get a say and our opinion doesn't really matter, unless we also happen to own aerospace companies. As such what we might have to gain depends on what the men in the arena choose to share or sell from the results of their efforts.
I don't think it is. The hard part is building Starship, which is being done anyway.
After that, it's conceivable that the cost to travel there will eventually fall to a few million or tens of millions of dollars per person. At that point, a handful of rich people could drive enough demand for the development of colonization technology that it becomes self-funding.
We can't live on mars without living inside massive radiation shielding probably underground. There won't be enough industry this century for Mars to be self sustaining if we start tomorrow.
For the non-scientist living on mars would be living in a cave worse than that enjoyed by most poor people in absolute boredom 99.5% of the time.
Your martian adventure will cost an appreciable portion of a billion dollars, include a return ticket, and continual support from home. It will be a very high cost ammortized over few units and it will never be self funding.
> Its basically impossible to finance a meaningful try at colonizing mars without national resources
That's a separate point: Citizens don't really get a say in how national resources are deployed, though the theatre of elections certainly makes them think they do (Recall that dude at Davos who said, "There are 150 people who run the world, all of them are men, and none of them are politicians"?).
The point is: you and I, unless we own private aerospace companies, don't get a say and don't matter in the question of "why Mars".
We'll certainly be allowed and encouraged to "make your voices heard" and many, including politicians and "representatives", will protest about the trillions of "taxpayer dollars that could be put to a better use". But the people who are doing the innovation and taking the most risk with their own capital will decide.
> Again the capitalists will be contributing little […] The person driving the school bus risks more and contributes more than the parasites.
Your basic assumptions are wrong and troubled by motivated reasoning. But I'm sure you can already tell where you are wrong so I won't condescend. Certainly you seem to have strong feelings, which is cool and all.
> We aren't. It's the individuals who own the resources and money to implement space flight and Mars colonisation that are going to Mars.
> But the people who are doing the innovation and taking the most risk with their own capital will decide.
> will protest about the trillions of "taxpayer dollars that could be put to a better use"
There aren't any individuals that own the resources to implement space flight and mars colonization you yourself admitted as much with the "trillions of taxpayer dollars" Those last 2 quotes contradicting themselves are literally back to back
> Citizens don't really get a say in how national resources are deployed
Every two years we do in the US.
> Your basic assumptions are wrong and troubled by motivated reasoning. But I'm sure you can already tell where you are wrong so I won't condescend.
You have condescended to me but you haven't explained how I'm wrong and I don't think I am. If so pray tell.
Money as a fundamental unit of value outside of economics leads to nonsensical conclusions like taking a money guy who presently employs a stable of geniuses who themselves sit atop the result of man millennia of labor by singular irreplaceable people and assigning credit to the current idiot who owns the works.
It leads you to imagine that owning a hundred billion is as valuable a contribution as a million teachers or that someone who risks 90% of his fortune by ceding a bigger piece of the economic pie to another billionaire and thereby downsizing to fewer trips to space is somehow risking a billion times more than someone actually risking their life.
It's like listening to a psychologist try to understand the evolution of galaxies via their domain knowledge.
Capitalism is a method to allocate resources within a society it offers no meaningful truths about it. It is on the whole a massive failure only slightly less stupid than prior iterations of central planning.
Back on the topic of mars. It is fundamentally absolutely useless as a second home for man. It is at best a place where a small number of people can do interesting science. There wont be a meaningful number of people there because the entire idea is fundamentally flawed.
Would you like to talk about that or would you like to educate me about capitalism and government?
This is one of my reasons. I also believe that compared to the Moon, Mars is more likely to both give crewed spaceflight and human habitation of other bodies the big boost it needs and make it more of a permanent fixture — the Moon’s relative convenience is a problem in that it makes it just as easy to mothball as it is to get to. Lingering too long on the Moon as the focal point brings substantial risk of backsliding into Shuttle-era stagnation.
It’s a result of the much higher level of commitment required to undertake crewed Mars missions. You can’t lean on Earth being nearby and contingencies have to include e.g. uncrewed resupply missions failing… it’s the sort of thing you have to go all-in on, after which pulling out is costly and looks stupid.
By contrast, backing out of the moon is comparatively trivial. At worst it’d take a couple weeks and the expenses quickly lost in the noise.
With Mars, there’s also the possibility of a “Wild West” element once things are established enough where groups of people simply refuse to return and cutting off support from them would have really bad optics.