Comment by sorcerer-mar
20 hours ago
> You could have levied the same argument against the Apollo program, any of FDR's New Deal megaprojects, the national highway system, the Large Hadron Collider, ITER, etc
All of those had (and always had) far more obvious benefits than colonizing Mars, including the squishy benefit of "beating the Soviet Union to a contested goal."
You can disprove me by stating plainly what the benefits of colonizing Mars would be?
Current international law prohibits nation states from establishing permanent territories or settlements, but the Artemis Accords both afford states the opportunity to exploit resources and establish "safety zones" around operational settlements that prohibit other actors from interfering with them. This means that, practically speaking, whoever establishes a permanent operational presence on any celestial body has a right to exclude other actors from those settlements, which establishes a bit of a land grab.
Given the current geopolitical climate, it's possible we could see nation states feel an urgent need to stake their claim in order to not lose out on access to those resources forevermore. This is just as much, if not more, of an argument to colonize the Moon rather than Mars, but both are subject to the same international laws.
The Artemis Accords don't establish a land grab, they just don't prevent one.
So this argument is: we need to get there first so we can mine it. But what can we mine? We have no evidence of anything on Mars that's valuable to mine for any reason other than Mars colonization or further space exploration.
If you don't already believe Mars colonization or space exploration are intrinsically valuable, there's no evidence of anything worth mining on Mars.