Comment by elevaet

No air, scarce water, radiation challenges. Comms to earth has a 3min lag on a good day, 6mins roundtrip. On a bad day it's 45mins.

We are better off at this stage of human civilization to look at building resiliency and redundancy at home. Settling margins of Earth in places like Antarctica, underground, under water is many orders of magnitude simpler than Mars, provides useful models for distant future space colonization, and also provides us with some of the civilizational redundancy and resiliency many space-colony-enthusiasts are looking for.