Maybe we'd be better off investing in developing technology that can take the risk of exploring Mars for us, and also benefit from the side effect of being able to use that same tech here at home for any number of things.

But colonizing the Moon or Mars is a competition where the prize is far more than "well, we're here".

Starship is a technology that will enable the colonization of Mars, but also many other things such as large-near earth O'Neill Cylinders, manned exploration of the entire inner solar system, far more massive space telescopes at a fraction of today’s cost, high bandwidth low latency satellite communications all over the world.

But this isn't about the development of Starship. Colonizing Mars entails far more than that. I simply believe that developing some tech that can successfully and efficiently "colonize" and explore other planets for us would have a far bigger impact at home. This doesn't imply in any way that Starship development should or would not continue anyway. It is not predicated on colonizing Mars but simply "going to space".

You go to Mars for science, to maybe find the first extraterrestrial life, or proof of its former existence.

You go to Mars to discover it’s unknown history.

You go to Mars to find out how to keep humans alive on others planets.

All those things will naturally produce byproducts that will be useful on Earth. Starship will ensure it’s cheap to do them.

I think you may have missinterpreted my comments. "Developing technology that can take the risk of exploring Mars for us" and "developing some tech that can successfully and efficiently colonize and explore other planets for us" meant using machines instead of humans to do it. Your arguments don't actually contradict this.

It would be incredibly expensive to do anything ambitious with machines. Right now we have a multi billion dollar rover attempting to dig a tiny hole on Mars, and it’s been failing for two years.

By comparison sending hundreds of tons of supplies and dozens of astronauts using three Starships will likely cost less than that single rover did.

Perhaps but you don't judge space travel by the half a trillion dollars it cost us to put boots on the Moon. It gets cheaper as we do it and this was my whole point. In the long run we will probably have to develop such tech anyway if we want to go anywhere beyond Mars so it would be a worthwhile investment. It would pay off by letting us explore every place that humans can't feasibly reach but hold a lot of promise for exploration. Like Europa, Enceladus, Ganymede, Callisto, Titan, maybe even Venus. It would probably also pay off here at home, there are plenty of applications for such tech (hopefully to improve life rather than as a military tool).

Anyway either option has no real impact on the development of rocketry tech. Whatever we choose it still has to get there somehow.

At least as far as colonization goes, I feel like we're getting really close to not needing to colonize a place to learn a great deal.

How would you judge what you could learn being close to a place for extended, uninterrupted periods of time? How would you get incentivised to invent something out of this world because you're in another one?

Unique experiences are something which you can't have otherwise. So you're missing them if you're not close. Why to have such a disadvantage, maybe not for everything, but for something?

I just wonder if the scale of effort to colonize and support humans really provides a net benefit considering how successful remote programs have been.

There's so much you don't need to do if you're not sending humans.

The first astronauts will explore more of Mars in their first few days than rovers have done in 50 years.

Mars likely had life and we won’t be really sure of what kind and it’s history until we get boots on the ground. Robots are great for very limited tasks, but take decades and billions to design, build and deliver to do what a scientist can do in an afternoon. Right now we have one rover that bern failing to dig a hole fir nearly two years.

Considering the volume of resources expended to get people to mars and host them there and return them... I'm not sure that it is a fair comparison.

The volume of resources for a NASA style plan is indeed mind boggling.

But the Mars DIRECT and SpaceX plans are more than an order of magnitude cheaper and easier. The SpaceX plan it’s hundreds of explorers on Mars for less than $10B.

Yeah no doubt they can save money but no getting around the sheer amount of mass you need to move to maintain humans.

Of course that's worth it, but it just takes a few teams and could even be done exclusively with robots.