Comment by ryandrake
1 day ago
Consider what it takes just to keep McMurdo Station (staffed by only 200-1000 people) running on Antarctica, and that's on our own planet. I don't know what the cost is, but according to [1] the budget for the US's Antarctic program overall was $356M in 2008. And it depends on reliable logistics to get people and things to and from it.
From there, step up to the ISS, which costs about $4B/year to maintain and operate, an order of magnitude more.
It's likely another order of magnitude (tens of billions/year) and probably more like two (hundreds of billions/year) to do the same thing on Mars.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Antarctic_Progra...
Which makes it just a matter of priorities. If the USA spent 10% of its defence budget for a year on it, we'd be done. Would humanity benefit more from a Mars base than it does from 10% of the USA's defence budget? Almost certainly.
Though, to be fair, there are a lot of other things we could spend 10% of the USA defence budget on that would benefit humanity a lot more in the short term.
10% is not even 100 billion. You are wildly optimistic. 100B a year is likely closer to the cost of just maintaining a mars base. The cost to actually build one is likely an order of magnitude higher.