...really? How many cities run on recycled air produced from rocks? On recycled water from melted permafrost? With 100% solar power? Eating entirely food grown using the same? With the risk that if any ine of those things fails, everyone living there will certainly die?
To this you compare the fact that I eat cows fed grass from a hundred miles away, brought to me using energy we literally just dug out of the ground? That I drink water piped from a giant lake all of halfway across the county?
If anything, you support my point: what passes for "remote" and "inhospitable" on Earth is unbelievably luxurious by the standard of anywhere else. Even Death Valley gets rain. Even Antarctica has oxygen. Talk to me about your plans for a self-sustaining colony in one of those places, and then we can talk about how many times -- how many orders of magnitude -- harder and more expensive it will be to do the same thing on Mars.
I'll just answer with this: nobody who goes will be thinking like that. Sure there are problems, but really, all of them are solvable - we're not 16th-century folks grappling with science, we're 3rd-millenium folks with centuries of science behind us.
Graphene filters to purify sublimated water-ice. Solar cells manufactured from sand and plastic. Oxygen siezed from rocks, lots at first but then just recycled thru green growing things.
Plenty of folks starved in the New World when their support systems ran out, doesn't matter whether it was oxygen or food, dead just the same. The point is, they were willing to take the risk with a whole continent to win.
Now its a whole planet! With different challenges, different storms and temperatures. Without challenges like locusts, floods, communication issues, pesky natives to deal with.
To this you compare the fact that I eat cows fed grass from a hundred miles away, brought to me using energy we literally just dug out of the ground? That I drink water piped from a giant lake all of halfway across the county?
If anything, you support my point: what passes for "remote" and "inhospitable" on Earth is unbelievably luxurious by the standard of anywhere else. Even Death Valley gets rain. Even Antarctica has oxygen. Talk to me about your plans for a self-sustaining colony in one of those places, and then we can talk about how many times -- how many orders of magnitude -- harder and more expensive it will be to do the same thing on Mars.