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Well, we're going to have to colonize mars at one point. That's not a debate. We can't survive as a species with all our eggs in one basket (pun intended, given the context) where a single rock flying through space can wipe out all the gains of our civilization. In the long term, this will require planetary-scale terraforming. In the short term, this will require seasonal unmanned supply drops and so the experience w…
> Well, we're going to have to colonize mars at one point. That's not a debate. I don't know why people say this like it's a fact. It'd be cheaper to fix the planet. Even if it weren't, the moon is many magnitudes closer. Also, "terraforming" mars isn't even possible. Mars has no magnetosphere - if you managed to create an atmosphere at all, it would be promptly blown away by solar winds and radiation.
When people say the atmosphere blew away they mean over a period of millions of years. We can easily resupply an atmosphere every million years.