'A City on Mars' is a reality check for anyone dreaming about life on the Red Planet
'A City on Mars' is a reality check for anyone dreaming about life on the Red Planet

www.space.com
'A City on Mars' is a reality check for anyone dreaming about life on the Red Planet

I really don't understand the obsession with Mars to be honest. The Moon seems like the obvious choice for building a permanent outpost. It's much closer, so if anything happens then there's at least the possibility of sending help. It doesn't have atmosphere meaning that you don't have to deal with problems like dust storms. It also has far lower gravity so it would be possible to build infrastructure like space elevators, and lack of atmosphere makes high speed maglev trains possible.
While living on the surface would be problematic due to radiation and dust, it would be possible to build large underground habitats. It might even be possible to find lava tubes and simply pressurize them. There wouldn't be any actual reason to go outside. We already know there is water and all sorts of minerals on the moon as well, so it would be possible for the outpost to be largely self sufficient.
If industry was bootstrapped and a space elevator built, which can be done with current technology, then it would be possible to send effectively unlimited amount of stuff into orbit from there. You could build large space habitats, and space ships designed to stay in orbit that just dock with the elevator. This would pave the way to making deep space missions of the kind we could only dream of now.