In the long term, Mars is a great refueling station because it has carbon dioxide and water that can be used to make methane, and it has much weaker gravity than Earth. That would make it much easier to access the asteroid belt, which may have a lot of valuable minerals.
There may also be some not-so-obvious benefits to living on Mars. For instance, people with mobility issues may be stuck in a wheelchair on Earth but be able to walk on Mars. (The optics of shipping all our old people to Mars isn't great, but it might actually be a pretty awesome spot for an old folks home.)
Another reason people have for going to Mars is the same as people who migrated from Europe to the Americas: to get away from a political situation they don't like and start a new life. If the optics of sending old people to Mars is bad, the optics of sending, say, Syrian refugees to Mars is even worse, but if someone wants a fresh start that's one way to do it. At least until Mars becomes as dysfunctionally political and tribal as Earth.
In the very short term, sending people to Mars may have a big impact on children being interested in science. I don't know if it's still the case that if you ask an elementary-aged child what they want to be when they grow up, it'll probably either be "an astronaut" or "president of the United States", but I think it was when I was that age.
I'm waiting on powered exoskeletons as my sci-fi mobility aid of choice.
I think this because you can trick most programs into handing over money without giving results, but there isn’t a way to trick physics.
We can barely make places like Antartica survivable! Huge chunks of "totally fine" places like Hawaii only exist thanks to massive shipping industries. If you have a way to build out a livable space on Mars, please give us Earthlings some of that technology cuz it would be pretty useful to a lot of people!
And possibly for individuals as well, given the potentially almost limitless resources available in Space.
And you hit on a good point in your last sentence: Developing a self-sustaining civilization on Mars would PROVE we can easily be sustainable on Earth.
I think the trouble is that people don't get just how bad Mars is. Take the peak of Everest, cross it with Antarctica, and dose it with radiation. Sounds bad? You're still nowhere near as bad as Mars. It's really, really bad.
Over a long enough time frame, the chance is nearly 100%.
A planetary extinction-level event has already happened where every land animal larger than 25kg died. Maybe it won't happen for another 65 million years. Maybe it will happen tomorrow. Maybe there will be a massive gamma ray burst that will sterilize the entire solar system. Who knows?
But just because we will eventually die out doesn't mean that we can't try to do what we can to survive. And anyway, say what you will about Elon's whole "thing", but a life where we're exploring the solar system is more exciting than one where we aren't.
Right, but... Mars is already worse for human life than Earth after every major extinction event. That's like "in case my house catches fire, I'm gonna build a backup house inside a working industrial furnace". If what we're worried about is surviving an event like the several that have affected Earth in the history of life on the planet, Mars is both more expensive and worse than a bunch of other options, including other space-based options (though I think that whole class of solutions is really wasteful compared to boring, Earthbound alternatives). That's a bad reason for going to Mars, is all I'm saying. I'll still be cheering along when the first boot-print is made, mind you.
OK, here: strip Earth of all oxygen and its ozone layer and turn all the land into parched deserts that can barely support even the hardiest of plants. You want to wake up in a sealed shelter on Earth, or on Mars, after that happens? The smart answer is "on Earth" because the list of horrible things about your situation on Mars is still 5x that long, plus all those things are already problems there. Mars is very, very, very bad.
Sports are a branch of the entertainment industry. You don’t get paid to run fast, you get paid to gather crowds. Same for Mars, and it only impacts ideas and hope, not actual well-being. But it’s still required, otherwise people err in Brownian directions.
I hope very much that the new Mars funding will be taken off the football spendings.
It's somewhere around lipstick market worth of ~10B dollar per year.