That remote mining town also has something going for it that Mars doesn't - economic viability. The energy cost of going to and from mars makes any sort of known resource extraction economically unviable. Palladium, one of the most valuable elements in existence (and probably the most valuable in wide use), is ~$2400/troy oz. At 21967 troy oz/ton, that is ~ $53 million/ton or $76k/kg. Ignoring decreases in prices if a supply was found large enough to fund a Mars colony (2018 saw only 9 million ozt or 409 tons of supply), current return costs are in the billions of $/KG. 3 order of magnitude decrease would still be millions $/KG, and that is assuming there are nuggets lying on the ground that a robot could easily pick up and ship back.

Now one can argue - that is current technology. And that is correct. But you would need to get interplanetary total mining/collection/launch/return costs to sub $76k/kg to even be economically neutral, in the most ideal situation, for literal palladium nuggets sitting on the ground in essentially a big pile near your launch site.

We could speculate on the potential improvement in costs, etc. and they might eventually come. But what we don't have so far is anything on mars economically worth getting or living there to get, even at 'drive there in my car' costs, let along launch costs.

Going to mars as a purely a exploration/discovery/science project/hobby - totally worthwhile. So far we have no reason to believe it's economically worthwhile actually living there.