[ufmace]

> Sending a few people to Mars will be the first steps in becoming a multi-planetary civilization, which will reduce our dependency on a single-point-of-failure for all known life.

Only if we are able to make the Martian colony self-sufficient. This is quite a problem, as even major nations on Earth aren't really self-sufficient now. Any serious attempt at trying would most likely require tens of thousands of colonists and massive amounts of materiel to be transported to Mars and sustained there. This would require many, many orders of magnitude more resources than any plausible manned mission to Mars, which is already so expensive that nobody seems to be willing to do it.

[danielweber]

A Mars colony would obviously not be an autarky. But after a few decades, equipment could be set up so that it could be self-sufficient if it needed to.

The US could be self-sufficient, too. It's not because trade is too valuable.

[seanflyon]

Yes self sufficiency is hard, we don't even know how hard, but the first step is a colony. A colony that produces or recycles all of its air and water and half of it's food is well within current technology (though still quite difficult) and the perfect way to understand exactly what we need to learn to have a self sufficient colony. Semiconductor fabs can come later.

Just sending people there for a year and a half is a great first step.