Mars is a very cool place to explore but rubbish for colonization.
In terms of exploration there are all sorts of fascinating questions that we could try to get answered, many having to do with the origins of our solar system and life. Actually getting there and back wouldn't require any tech that we haven't had for 50 years now. It's largely a matter of scale, money, and political will. As useful as remote exploration is, it suffers from serious downsides when you have a minimum 4 minute speed-o-light lag.
Morons like Musk who want to colonize Mars, and ruin a lot of the exploration potential in the process, simply don't know what they're doing. Colonization to preserve our species suffers the very simple flaw that we're our own greatest threat and there's nowhere that we can send people that we can't send weapons. More importantly, any Mars colony wouldn't be anywhere near self-sufficient for centuries, if not millennia. But the real problem is Mars itself. With neither a magnetosphere nor significant atmosphere the radiation levels at ground level are lethal over the long term. Any colonists would become troglodites and they'd almost certainly have to live deep. Food would be even more problematic, trying to soak up half the sunlight that it's used to while succeeding in soaking up cosmic rays. The low gravity would almost certainly play havoc with human physiology. Energy is a real bugger, with solar being 50% less efficient when there aren't multi-year global dust storms (bad for those crops too), wind doesn't do jack due to the pitifully thin atmosphere, no fossil fuels, and nuclear requires a handy place to dump the heat that doesn't exist on Mars. But the real problem is location, location, location. Mars isn't anywhere useful for anything, so it's a lot of effort to live in the boonies of the solar system.
In terms of exploration there are all sorts of fascinating questions that we could try to get answered, many having to do with the origins of our solar system and life. Actually getting there and back wouldn't require any tech that we haven't had for 50 years now. It's largely a matter of scale, money, and political will. As useful as remote exploration is, it suffers from serious downsides when you have a minimum 4 minute speed-o-light lag.
Morons like Musk who want to colonize Mars, and ruin a lot of the exploration potential in the process, simply don't know what they're doing. Colonization to preserve our species suffers the very simple flaw that we're our own greatest threat and there's nowhere that we can send people that we can't send weapons. More importantly, any Mars colony wouldn't be anywhere near self-sufficient for centuries, if not millennia. But the real problem is Mars itself. With neither a magnetosphere nor significant atmosphere the radiation levels at ground level are lethal over the long term. Any colonists would become troglodites and they'd almost certainly have to live deep. Food would be even more problematic, trying to soak up half the sunlight that it's used to while succeeding in soaking up cosmic rays. The low gravity would almost certainly play havoc with human physiology. Energy is a real bugger, with solar being 50% less efficient when there aren't multi-year global dust storms (bad for those crops too), wind doesn't do jack due to the pitifully thin atmosphere, no fossil fuels, and nuclear requires a handy place to dump the heat that doesn't exist on Mars. But the real problem is location, location, location. Mars isn't anywhere useful for anything, so it's a lot of effort to live in the boonies of the solar system.
