Your comparison is WAY more terrible than my own.
A mission to a dusty rock while your own beautiful planet is dying is a weird way to help a tech bro claim more tax resources for himself.
Exploitable constrained human power shipped across a sea by way of a costly, lossy transport system. Colonising the Americas without a latent labour pool and social hierarchy to swap over would have been near impossible for pre-industrial Europe.
It would have required long-term support across months of shipping and communication time for purchase of unknown resources in unknown time scales in respect of unknown risks. Sound familiar?