It’s probably habitable to microbes, and there are many microbes already known that will be able to survive on Mars if those habitats exist there. Here is the article I wrote for wikipedia about it, which has loads of cites to follow up to find more: Modern Mars habitability See the section Candidate lifeforms for Mars
It’s not at all habitable to humans. There’s no oxygen to breathe for a starter. The 24 hour day is not much of an advantage when it gets so cold at night for carbon dioxide to freeze out as frost even for 100 days of the year in the equatorial regions. The air is so thin you need a full body pressure suit to survive or the moisture in your lungs would boil as would your saliva and the moisture on your eyes - and those don’t come cheap, current cost is millions of dollars and they only last a few EVAs before they have to be repaired and eventually replaced.
And - as far as economics is concerned, the Moon wins over Mars all the way. See my:
With the big advantage that it is close to Earth and not in the deep gravity well of Mars, only double the gravity but it’s much more in effect on the cost because of the rocket equation and because also the Moon is always the same distance from Earth and you can get back in two days. With Hoyt’s cislunar tether system you could export to Earth without using fuel at all.
Robert Zubrin has one possible export, apart form ideas, his deuterium exports - it doesn’t work out if you look into it in detail. It would make no economic sense to make deuterium on Mars which is only slightly concentrated relative to Earth - it would save only one step of the many used in a deuterium factory on Earth as they repeatedly concentrate it.
As for intellectual property as a source of income - well that works as well or not on the Moon, if people need to be somewhere challenging, but I find that totally unconvincing, the trade of intellectual property would be the other way. I cover that in my
- Commercial value for Mars
- Would a space colony survive with only exports of intellectual property to pay for imports?
There’s nothing valuable there that is worth the cost of exporting back to Earth that we know of. The only way to live there is in a habitat that is built to hold in the tons per square meter of outwards pressure of your air. None of our crops can grow there, nor can trees. The air is too thin for fresh water on the surface. There may be some seeps of millimeters thick layers of salty water and just possibly centimeters thick fresh water at the poles. It has ice but not much, only at its poles - Antarctica would be a paradise on Mars and has far more ice than the whole of Mars.
Some lichens might be able to survive in cracks in the rocks on Mars, and there may be lichens there already for all we know.
Indeed, if you compare the habitability of the Moon and of Mars, then the Moon wins over Mars in one comparison after another. By coincidence its axis is almost vertical, and some of the peaks near its poles get sunlight 24/7 and almost all year round apart from a couple of days or so, almost constant temperature too. It probably has vast amounts of ice, hundreds of millions of tons at the poles - we don’t know for sure because we know so little about the Moon. It’s not been studied in anything like the detail of Mars yet, apart from those short visits in the 1960s to 1970s with the technology of their day which only went to its equatorial regions. It also has caves we now know, though we don’t know how large, but could be kilometers in diameter in its low gravity.
Lots of other advantages but this is an answer about Mars so I’ll just link to my Case For Moon First
Now, Mars is of great interest scientifically, and it was far more habitable in the past. It had oceans, and later on lakes, had a comparatively thick atmosphere. The oceans and lakes may have been frozen over but we don’t really know in detail yet. It might be our first chance to actually study present day living extraterrestrial microbes.
This life could be vulnerable to Earth life. For instance there must have been some form of life on Earth before DNA life but nobody knows what it was. What if that life is still there on Mars? It’s not so impossible as some biologists have hypothesized it could still be here on Earth as a “Shadow biosphere”. We haven’t found it and probably DNA based life made it extinct. But what if it is still there on Mars? Then it would be vulnerable to whatever made it extinct on Earth.
Then - Mars is globally connected, the dust storms carry small particles throughout Mars every few years. Also humans landing on Mars could easily crash as with the space shuttle disasters - and leave debris spread over hundreds of kilometers of the Mars surface. It’s probably the most dangerous landing in our inner solar system, more dangerous than landing on Earth. So - think what the microbes from such a crash could do to any native Mars life?
I think we should send humans to the Moon first, and then to Mars orbit, and study Mars from orbit via telepresence. Then decide what to do next based on what we find out about Mars. It’s far too soon to say what effect humans on Mars would have on the planet. And it’s not a “des res” for humans.
For more on this see my
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