Comment by hnbad

I'm not saying we won't possibly land someone on Mars eventually. I just don't think that's going to happen in a reasonable near future. The resources involved are too much for one person willing to go on a suicide mission to do it themselves (and those who do have the resources are very much not interested in dying) and for a government to sponsor this you would need a culture of self-sacrifice rather than rugged individualism - in other words, a country like China might be more likely to take the lead here than the US and even that seems unlikely.

Again, the big problem here is scale. It takes a lot more resources to send someone to Mars than to Antarctica and it takes a lot more resources to keep them alive there. Your friend in the high arctic trundra probably also isn't living in collapsible tents and foraging for food - all the infrastructure available to him (even if it's just shelter) needs to be built on Mars too and is orders of magnitude more complex and more resource intense and the materials are much harder to ship and assemble - plus of course material failure is signficantly more lethal.