Alternately: UK? Spain? Portugal? Netherlands? Got rich on above said idiots.
Maybe you live in the western USA?
Maybe you have Polynesian Ancestry? Or Scandinavian?
Have you ever taken a trans-atlantic flight? Ordered anything from overseas? Made a long-distance phone call? Used GPS?
You know what, let's have a few idiots who go exploring in every generation.
You might also want to think about how to keep critical machinery running on the end of a six month - best case - supply chain.
"Take three of everything" might work practically, but will raise some eyebrows economically.
Those are the hard problems. Compared to them, getting there is trivially easy.
Current investment in space endeavors in eg. the USA is around 0.1% GDP. Even if you double it (or 10x it), that's not going to break the bank. If we take your optimistic estimate (profitable after a few decades) it might just be a risk that's worth it today, on a nation-scale.
(Edit: unfortunately I couldn't find good GDP figures for the 1600's , but taking investments in eg british and dutch east india companies vs a guesstimated GDP, I also got to around 0.1% +/- 1 OOM, which seems like a reasonable estimate of exploration costs as % GDP , and thus modern investment levels seem to be reasonably in line with that. )
Food is an interesting challenge, since we haven't done food production at scale beyond earth yet. Small scale experiments and applications seem promising though.
Full self-sustaining is not a requirement provided there is a supply chain. (And vice versa) . Of course: As self-self sustaining as possible as soon as possible would definitely be something to aim for.
The one company proposing to colonize mars in the near future would do so with a fleet of reusable spacecraft capable of 100-metric-tons to mars surface.
"Take three of everything" becomes a bit less of a problem in that kind of situation.
Within those constraints, the challenges are certainly still significant, but need not be insurmountable. Also said ship is -itself- not yet proven, so we'll have to wait and see.
What a miserly way to look at the world when you yourself live in it benefiting from centuries of similarly flexible-minded people working towards similarly extreme ideas for their time.
There's nothing innately wrong with the idea of colonizing these worlds. It's just a hard thing to do for the time being, like so much else was that's now not only accepted but so routine as to be a fundamental part of daily civilization.
That is a subject of disagreement. Kim Stanley Robinson depicted a coming clash between proponents of Mars colonization and keep-it-untouched environmentalists in his Mars trilogy. (And from his later novel Aurora, one wonders if KSR has actually gone over to the anti-human-expansion side.) Thirty years ago, that might have seemed fanciful, but not today when environmentalism has made wider inroads, especially among younger generations. It is easy to find rhetoric now about the future of humanity where the writer talks about the need for degrowth, humanity as a virus, etc.
Just because certain groups of people have beliefs about the "wrongness" of something, doesn't mean that they're in the least bit rational or need to be given weight. The uh space, beyond the Earth is literally a blasted wasteland created from ancient formation violence. Nothing we do in that sterile, radioactive, chemically toxic vastness of planets, rocks, ice and open void would by any sane definition be comparable to some sort of ecocide on earth, where extremely precious flora and fauna are destroyed.
The philosophy of degrowth is entirely a subjective moral view, no more morally valid than a philosophy of more growth, and humanity is emphatically not a virus, it just is, like any other complex species on Earth.
A radio telescope on the far side of the Moon would be nice. But there are no slaves or spices, and no gold or other metals at prices that make the economics even remotely sane.
We'd be going for the sake of going - a good enough reason mythologically, but a very tough sell economically.
IMO we'd be better off clawing back the physics PhDs who work in finance and applying them to a blue sky search for new physics. With current tech there's a serious risk of a(nother) Space Winter when the initial wave either fails or doesn't generate any rewards.
Very much untrue, at least in part. The solar system, including the asteroids, moon and other bodies, is absolutely, insanely loaded with valuable minerals and materials to a degree that makes what the old colonial powers sought in the New World and Africa pale in comparison, it's just extremely difficult and expensive to reach, for now, so on the second part of your comment, you're correct.
However, it's worth noting that the technology for extraction absolutely would scale down in cost over time to the point of space mining being as routinely profitable and practical as mining on earth.
I don't like comparing space exploration to the fundamentally cruel and exploitative schemes of Earth's governments during the colonial periods but even they at first had to deal with high costs and little benefit, until they developed scale. Humanity could do the same thing beyond the earth, and without all the grotesque moral failures of destroying whole human cultures in the process.
I think Mars is a bad choice for a first attempt at a permanent village in space, let alone colony, because things will go wrong and the distance is so large help from earth can't[0] arrive in less than several months. Moon? Few days. Could fix "our food cargo storage exploded/was infected with deadly mould and now we don't have any" if it's on the moon, everyone dies if that happens on Mars.
Mars does have one advantage for saving the earth, though: even if we never actually go, developing the tech to make a self-sustaining colony on Mars necessary solves the biggest environmental challenges on earth.
[0] with current rockets; in principle faster ones can be made, but nuclear propulsion is frowned on for various reasons depending on exactly which one is under discussion
I can't get off this authoritarian nightmare rock soon enough.
Think "company town" but so, so much worse.
The desolate environment, required infrastructure, and costs make me see exploitation in that future... not freedom.
This nightmare rock has abundance and greed. We've struggled with "easy mode"!
Space doesn't exactly improve that; hellish rocks with nothing but our greed. Whoever delivers has the authority!
Even with a more optimistic take, I don't like it.
Posit that we have a nice overlord. They provide and expect nothing back.
Given the environment, they'll determine that surveillance is paramount to safety of The Dome.
We can't have someone spacing everybody.
A hard reset on surveillance is required. We have to build housing that cannot be surveilled, blacklist by default. Only whitelist approved sensors.
To sustain The Dome, we must all have children here. Flying them up is mighty expensive!
Dereliction thins the gene pool and will be punished.
Assign all the mates and expect all the children you want, again you have agricultural control. Taking away food is totalitarian as needed.
Don't look at my exam paper, don't look at my christmas present, don't look in my bedroom. They're for me, not the NSA.