Because its cool. Because its interesting. Because it is baked into our monkey brains to want to explore.
If people want to push the frontier, why are you such a grump about it?
You know what we're going to find on Mars? Rocks. A whole lot of radiation. No breathable atmosphere and freezing temperatures.
Imagine the most hellish place on Earth - that's still better for humans than the most pleasant place on Mars.
Would it be "cool" to stand on Mars? To stand on another planet? Of course it would. And I firmly believe that we should continue our planetary explanation - but making plans for human habitation on Mars when we haven't even been back to the Moon in 50+ years is literally just stupid. Put a base there, learn how to make it self sufficient and then let's talk about Mars.
First of all, you can’t be positively certain of those. We don’t have access to the reasoning of why the Vikings decided to cross the Artic to America, or Polynesians crossing the Pacific.
Second of all, let’s say they did go to look for food. Are you sure they ran out of land to grow food, or forest for hunting that they had to look for new land? The answer is quite resounding no. Likewise, we don’t have to exhaust all of the resource on Earth before exploring other planets.
Finally, what were those mythological reasons you listed there, if not the desire of human being to explore?
The answer is an absolute and resounding yes, because that's exactly what hunter gatherers do - they move with the herds and where the food is. This isn't just an educated guess, we know this because there are still hunter tribes on Earth right now which do exactly this.
>>Finally, what were those mythological reasons you listed there, if not the desire of human being to explore?
We have historical records of entire tribes moving purely due to religious reasons, either believing that land somewhere else is sacred, or that the land they are on currently is condemned. If you think your deity lives over the horizon, then you get on your boat and go in that direction. Yes ultimately it's a desire to explore, but it's not just because it's "cool".
There are going to be people for whom the idea of a frontier life in a place of natural, untouched beauty appeals. We've always had those folks. Some of them find life is harder than they expected; some thrive.
Mars is just harsher than anywhere on earth. There's less of everything other than space and harmful radiation (and you sort of have to make the space that you want/need when you get there...)
It's the same here - most of the "human extinction"-scale events really don't touch a base that's 10km under water or under ground. Nuclear war or meteor strike? nope. Earthquakes? There are places safe from that. Solar flares? Nope. Deadly virus? Quarantine everyone arriving like you would with the journey to Mars.
Terrorism remains the main risk, but it would have been the same risk on Mars too.
And most importantly - it teaches us how to run an independent colony deep underground, which is important because despite all the Sci-Fi films showing us otherwise, the base on Mars would really have to be underground because of radiation risk.
So yeah, sure, run an underground base for a few decades then you can just transplant the technology to Mars - don't start with Mars first.
On that part we definitely both agree :)
Although, I would say that developing the tech to colonise Mars can be a useful rallying point for tech useful to Earth (if you can put a city of a million on the red planet, you can also put it in the middle of the Himalayas or Antarctica or the Sahara), in the same way that Tesla is useful as a rallying point for electric cars despite all the people I hear complaining about the build quality.
Plus where does your energy come from? You don't have solar. You need to make your own light to grow food. Geothermal is possible I guess but the ocean is terrible for corrosion and building. The high pressure at the bottom of the ocean makes everything worse.
For instance if people were starving or hiding from fallout, those doomsday shelters the rich are building for themselves would likely be overran by the locals who helped build them or heard all about them from town gossip.
And finally - I hope you aren't suggesting that the base on Mars is a way to escape "8 billion starving people".
Also I really don't like how the arguments so far are about preventing the starving people from coming over and messing things up. It strikes me as very "we need to keep the pleb out" kind of thinking, no different than what some rich people are doing.
Even if the entire surface is irradiated(somehow) you can still launch things into space with underground railguns. It's not what we currently use, but it's easier to imagine this than building a base on Mars with current(or near future) technology.
I would personally love such a habitat, and would market it as a Safe Space for The Curmudgeonly(TM).
We don't need to have a post-scarcity society before progressing science and technology by trying to and succeeding in colonizing Mars. Similarly we create plenty of technology while also not solving the post-scarcity "problem". Adding more resources or more people to solving a problem doesn't mean that it makes the problem easier or more likely to be solved. So you're creating this idea that we can't do X until we've done Y, when the truth is we can do X and Y.
Strategically I think we should create an international moon base first before going to Mars, but we can do both.
We flew to the Moon 50 years ago, logically there would have been human on Mars by now. That didn’t happen, so the next best time is as soon as possible. Like now.
As for limited resources, how much money do you think we spend for space exploration? We waste a lot more money and resource for other things. We should cut down those instead. Let’s take a trivial example. Do you think gaming is a waste of resource? Why don’t we cut down gaming?