Yes totally agree. I've often written about this. I think many don't realize quite how hostile to life Mars is.
Before we have the technology to colonize Mars we'd first get to the point where it is really easy to build a sea city.
The Seasteading Institute | Opening humanity's next frontier - this is far far easier to make self sustaining than a space colony.
Indeed for equivalent of space colonies, we'd have one that floats on the sea, takes in nothing except the sea water, and the air to breathe, and creates all its own food. Maybe imports some rocks. Probably extracts metals from the seawater.
A seasteading as completely self sufficient as that is pie in the sky at the moment. But self sufficient space colonies are like that, and in addition you have to create all your own air to breathe, have to hold in the atmosphere with ten tons per square meter outwards pressure, have to protect from cosmic radiation, the gravity may not be right for us (we don't know yet), and you have to make your own spacesuits and build it so it can be maintained and repaired by astronauts in spacesuits.
That's the worst of all, outside is a vacuum or as near as. Whenever you need to do anything to fix your habitat you have to don a spacesuit - and if you don't have a spacesuit or something happens to it, you can't get out of your habitat.
If anything happens to your habitat - it's not like on Earth where if your house burns down, you just rush out into the garden. On Mars you have to get into spacesuits, and if you can't find them, you've had it. There is nowhere habitable at all except your house, and other habitats - and they are only habitable so long as the many intricate machines that keep it running continue to work properly.
Nobody has ever tried to colonize anywhere remotely as hostile to life as that. There have been ideas to colonize the sea bed - far easier place to live - but they have come to nothing so far.
There are many places you can colonize on Earth. The Sahara desert is nearly as big as the US yet we don't colonize it. That would be a great place to make more habitable as it is gradually encroaching on the rest of Africa, they are doing their best to stop its advance, but it's a big job.
Nobody thinks of living permanently at the top of the highest mountains where it is extremely cold and windy, and there is too little oxygen to breathe. There are many uninhabited deserts and remote islands on Earth and they are all far far more habitable than Mars.
The only way it could work is to have a pyramid where you have maybe a hundred people on Earth to support every person on Mars.
I think that's true of all space settlement at present. Just because it's not very habitable out there. If we don't colonize deserts, why would it make it any easier to colonize a desert if it has a near vacuum or total vacuum in place of an atmosphere? Surely that would be a far far harder place to live.
I'm not at all anti space settlement. I just think that at present stage of technology it has to be done on this basis, in the same way that we do settlement in Antarctica - a base, supported from more hospitable places, because it is of scientific interest, or interest for recreation, or whatever reason - we support them because we feel that what they are doing is worth supporting.
When we haven't even got space settlement working in that sense, as settlements with support from Earth - far far too soon to think about just colonizing for its own sake .
I also think we need to take especial care with Mars. Because it is so like Earth in its early solar system and may be habitable today also for some forms of life. This makes it of exceptional interest. It would be a huge scientific tragedy for biology, if there is some unique form of life, maybe early life, on Mars and we either destroy it before we can discover it, or discover it only to realize that we have introduced (say) a more advanced lifeform to Mars in an irreversible way and that it will inevitably go extinct. Or many other possibilities where we might deeply regret introducing Earth life to Mars when it is too late to do anything about it.
It's not as if humans never make mistakes. Though very clever, even the cleverest people in the past have made many mistakes, especially biological, introducing species that cause problems. And we have never had this capability before, to transfer life from one planet to another.
This is a mistake that we just must not make, in my view as someone who loves science - to go to Mars only to find life we brought there ourselves, and with the indigenous life either extinct, or doomed to extinction.
And we don't know enough to decide yet. Meanwhile there are many other places we can build space settlements. We can try settlements on the Moon or using materials from the asteroid belt. They have a better chance of success as there's a reason for being there - materials they can mine of benefit to Earth for instance. And could have scientific outposts throughout the solar system.
Just - why so much focus on "colonizing" such a barren place, vacuum for atmosphere, cold as Antarctica, perchlorates in the dust poisonous to humans, global dust storms, can't go anywhere without a full body pressurized spacesuit. I think many half expect it to be like "Barsoom" although they know that in reality it is nothing like that. It's much more like the Moon than it is like Earth.
The red colour just indicates iron oxides, it doesn't mean it is habitable or Earth like. The soil can grow Earth crops if you have water and a pressurized greenhouse (far more robust than any Earth greenhouse as it has to withstand a ton or more of outwards pressure per square meter even if pressurized at a tenth of Earth atmosphere). But the gray lunar soil is also excellent for growing crops.
I wonder if there would be less interest in Mars if it was grey like the Moon or totally white? Or blue? Somehow coloured in such a way that it doesn't look like an Earth desert.
It is so cold it would be totally white if it wasn't that it is also so dry that there isn't enough ice to cover the planet.
See for instance my:
No Simple Genetic Test To Separate Earth From Mars Life - Zubrin's Argument Examined
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