I always get downvoted to oblivion for pointing this out, but the Elon Musk hype squad is just not being realistic about how far we are from establishing a permanent colony on mars. Severe issues remain.
A safety first attitude won't build a spacefaring civilization, but hopefully the Elon Musk anti-hype squad does not stop people from using their own resources to try and build one.
You won't know the what the severe issues are till you are there and trying to stay alive will be a great motivator to solve problems quickly. Simulating Mars gravity on Earth is impossible so Mars is going to be the best place to build a working model of a Mars colony.
Getting there would be. Living there would be constant danger plus tedium, the space equivalent of working on a farm barely making ends meet for the rest of your life. Such lives don't have enough dopamine hits to keep people of such dispositions around long.
Humans, somehow, manage.
Training for ultra-marathons (and running them) is painful and tedious. The thing that people need are goals. For example "survive on Mars for 2 months". Then the next person will come along and say "I bet I can do in for 3". Then 6, then 12. And if enough people do it, suddenly you have a "base camp" from which to run your extreme survival competitions.
The dopamine drip will last a long time. Eventually, someone will fall in love with Mars in the same way they fall in love with Everest or El Capitan, or whatever, and then a colony can start.
Humans are crazy, and a subset of us enjoy pushing past the boundaries merely to prove that it is possible to ourselves. To prove that we have no limits. I think those people should be given every opportunity that humanity can afford to give them to push the limits of human capability.
Gravity is probably one of the smaller problems. I don't see the point of going to Mars until we have a lot of experience doing similar things on the Moon or just on Earth. We should also have done a lot of long-distance flights like going to an Asteroid or just orbiting Mars first.
Right now a Mars colony would be plain suicide.
If the plan is to have a self-sustaining colony, then yes. But if supply flights are guarantied, I don't see the problem.
You can grow food in space. We do. We just can't have a enclosed system yet and are probably quite far away from it.
But I agree, that I think it makes much sense to do more ground- and moonwork first.
Nothing in spaceflight is guaranteed, and Earth-Mars spaceflight is a lot less subject to guarantee than Earth-ISS spaceflight, which hasn't been trouble free.
But yeah, we probably wouldn't put a base those places, not initially. Though I wonder if a volcano base would tell us more about the planet's interior...and its fairly flat including lots of high walls to protect against winds/storms?
https://www.esa.int/Our_Activities/Space_Science/Mars_Expres...
To survive planetary disaster? Well 1) Mars is already worse than most imaginable post-disaster Earths would likely be, and 2) you could build a couple highly-survivable emergency bunker-habitats and pay people to live in them (in shifts, say, so there are always enough inside to ensure survival but they're not stuck in there full time) for, surely, less money than Martian colony establishment & maintenance would cost. You might still screw it up and they might not succeed if things really got that bad, but I'd bet their odds are better than any Martian colony we're likely to manage to put up in the next 100 years.
I think on the architectural & engineering side developing structures for Mars would provide immense progress in understanding sustainability for life on earth or elsewhere. This has applications for doomsday scenarios if you care about that as well as just general efficiency and sustainability of structures.
Likewise I think Mars has benefit as a potential launch point for space travel as it has an abundance of fuel and a significantly lighter gravity well.
Another part is the whole "necessity is the mother of invention" aspect. There is no quicker way to progress than doing. Yes it may be horribly dangerous but trial by fire has been repeatedly shown as a very effective way of exploring the unknown.
We could call these bunker-habitats "vaults", maybe. Then proceed to raise some capital for our startup and eventually call it "Vault-Tec"[0].
> You might still screw it up and they might not succeed if things really got that bad, but I'd bet their odds are better than any Martian colony we're likely to manage to put up in the next 100 years.
We could further fund it by conducting various sociological experiments. What could go wrong?[1]
Mars has dust fine enough to be effectively aerosolised, and the low pressure makes removing it a bit tricky.
NASA has some ideas. https://www.nasa.gov/feature/kennedy-scientists-developing-t...
We haven't really used spin gravity in practice yet, so there are technical problems to solve there.
The most important thing for me is that most if not all of these problems are extremely relevant on earth and for dealing with climate change and overpopulation. Now one could say that we should then solve them for Earth first, but that's not how things work. We only have solar panels today because there wasn't any better way to power satellites. Earth makes things so easy that we won't go for >99% water reclamation, 0 waste green houses and so on.
The point is that, right now in 2019, we do not know how to build a self-sustaining colony outside of Earth's biosphere. If you want such a thing to exist, you have to do a lot of research first to enable it. But, in general, the space enthusiast crowd isn't interested in pushing for that kind of research. And without that research, a lot of the arguments for space travel are very moot.
You're very far away from all the people who can't/won't/etc. go to Mars. For the foreseeable future you'd still be subject to needing resources sent periodically, but this would at least be a pretty limited interface. Hopefully science would be a good enough export to pay for it, otherwise some kind of nonprofit endowment would be needed.