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I actually had an interesting conversation with Elon Musk about this. The question was, what would it take to build a self-sustaining settlement on the surface of Mars? It would take one million metric tons of stuff, propellant, the 3D printers, the stock for the 3D printers, food, agriculture, domes, wherever you're gonna live, all of it, to get to the point where you could have all that on Mars and those people could then survive without intervention from Earth. So one million metric tons, if you think about that, it takes a very large rocket and a whole sort of sophisticated spacecraft. The Curiosity mission was what, a couple billion dollar mission to get to Mars? And that Rover was one ton. That's the challenge we're talking about, sending one million Perseverances or Curiosities worth of mass to Mars. It's an enormous challenge. //
Right now we're focused on stepping one foot on Mars and then 10 and then a hundred, slowly building up to have a permanent human presence. There's no physics reason preventing us from inhabiting Mars, it's a matter of technology and engineering and patience, and most importantly, money. But there's no reason why we can't eventually be on Mars. Humanity will have a presence on Mars. Well, I'm not going.
