[cosmic_cheese]

Something that’s frequently lost in the discussion I think is that in the long term, Mars is a stepping stone.

While proponents think that Mars should be permanently inhabited and have cities, the larger point is to light a fire under the development of the technologies and techniques involved in crewed spaceflight and human habitats beyond Earth’s gravity well. Mars does this better than the Moon does because it has a higher baseline level of self-sustenance due to its much greater distance, and so if you get to the point that getting people to Mars and having them live there long term is no big deal, you’ve also essentially made humanity a proper spacefaring species — we’d no longer be so tied down to LEO and could have substantial crewed missions traversing the solar system and beyond.