I expected to be downvoted! It's a grim idea, that this is there is and there isn't some huge prize of "a whole galaxy" a thousand years down the line.

I would have resisted it when I was a kid, myself.

About fifteen years ago, I made an attempt to figure out how much it would cost to set up a self-sustaining colony on Mars. My target was a Mars that could make its own pressure suits because terraforming would take centuries and making your own pressure suits is a precursor to that.

I realized that you had to essentially re-invent almost every industrial process humans have today, from baking to smelting steel, because all of them rely on unlimited, free air, and large quantities of cheap water.

You need to recreate most of the chemical industry, just to create new computer chips, each one of which relies on hundreds of chemical compounds available at very very high purities and affordable prices.

After a lot of work, I was unable to come up with a figure. My best guess was $3 to $30 quadrillion dollars, if it were even possible!

And all of that to have a bunch of miserable real estate in a cold, dark, arid, lifeless, airless, radioactive desert characterized by fine, abrasive, statically charged, poisonous dust. Antarctica is nicer in every way - much warmer, much brighter, has breathable air, endless quantities of water, etc - and yet no one lives there.