Overly pessimistic. If we assume our species will go extinct regardless of what we do and do nothing to prevent that as a result, we will certainly go extinct. This is unacceptable.

Mars isn’t habitable. Making it habitable would be an inefficient use of time and energy because planets are inefficient already for a species that can make spin gravity. Bioforming humans to be able to live on Mars is risky because humans are fractious enough with us all being the same species. Therefore dismantling Mars to produce habitats which are suitable for humans is the most logical option.

Let me clarify my point. I do not think that there should be any sort of mass human settlement on Mars or attempt to use Mars as a second earth. That is what I am referring to with colonization. No dome cities or ridiculous ideas of terraforming.

We should also use those too and will probably use them first, I’m just adding my own two cents to the current “arguing about colonizing Mars” trend.

1. What history? It’s a dead rock with no life on it, let alone sentient life.

1a. Mercury is significantly harder to dismantle due to rapidly spinning next to the sun. You can’t build static structures there because they’d be melted.

2. We should also exploit the asteroid belt. I’m mostly titling this this to capitalize on the Mars colonization trend. Also it gets people’s attention and I dislike planets for being inefficient. Also, spin gravity.

3. We aren’t monkeys. Ideally we will become increasingly distinct from nonsapient life, most likely transitioning to becoming more mechanical since metal lasts longer than meat, and means we won’t need to waste space and mass on growing food.

4. When I talk about colonizing Mars, I don’t mean a few scientists, I mean the rather ridiculous ideas of dome cities or the hideously inefficient idea of terraforming

Matter cannot be created or destroyed, only changed. Also, Mars is, much like anything that isn’t the sun and Jupiter, gravitationally insignificant due to the fact that those two giants hold effectively all the mass in the solar system.

It would be fairly foolish to assemble the satellites on Mars itself. These are O’Neil cylinders we’re talking about here. You build those in space.

Scifi dreams too small.

Issac Arthur actually.

Temporary by design, and best handled by robots with humans in orbit keeping an eye on things from space stations with spin gravity since that is an environment humans can actually live in.

Agreed. A mission to Mars is necessary, primarily as a step in the exploitation of Mars for the eventual construction of a dyson swarm and galactic colonization fleet.

Self replicating mining robots, likely clanking self-replicators, combined with low cost launch infrastructure such as orbital launch loops combined with skyhook satellites. This process would likely require several centuries but is theoretically feasible, and would be relatively easy to implant on Mars relative to the other rocky planets. Given Venus is the nearest thing known to Hell and Mercury isn’t much better.

As for resources, simply put the mass necessary to construct a Dyson Swarm and the fleets needed to colonize and dominate the galaxy isn’t going to be coming from earth unless we want to destroy our homeworld to do it. Considering earth is possibly the only planet in the universe humans can live on relatively easily, this is a bad idea.

Nature only exists on earth. There is no nature on Mars. It’s a dead rock.

Why should we not prioritize the maximization of human flourishing? There is no logical reason to try and live on an irradiated toxic desert when we could simply use that desert as the raw materials to build ten thousand different paradises perfectly suited for human life?