The Moon though is 4 days away at any time. Bailout/emergency evac is much easier. And there are resources on the moon that may be viable for next gen tech(ie: Helium-3)

Mars is like 7-9 months away on the best pork chop plot. And even if you have something like an Aldrin cycler that may be able to cut that down at certain point to a few months, theres still a lot that can go wrong in that time. The average time to communicate to mars is something like 15 minutes as well. Its a totally different ballgame of "they are on their own". Even if you compare that to say....Christopher Columbus or others (that did similar for the time, but also knew there was a good chance they had the resources needed to survive)

Mars has some water and basic elements (O2, N2, H2O) but not much else otherwise. ANy food, probably drinks, shielding, and technology to make long term viability possible will have to be towed along.

Mars does seem like an option for expansion at some point. I am just not sure it will be in any of our lifetimes though.

> The same is true for the moon, yet we did that

Did what? We put a few people on the Moon during the Cold War, then we ignored it for 50 years.

Now there's another war with Russia, and we're talking about putting people on the Moon again. It's all about nationalistic nonsense.

Not to mention that the Moon is a heck of a lot closer to the Earth than Mars.

I don't think the conditions on Mars will kill the first few people going there. The transportation, including the landing, is much more dangerous. And those people won't even stay there. A couple of years at most for any one person. Then with time the stays will be extended.

Why don't we try living on the moon before attempting to live on Mars? The moon isn't any more hostile than Mars, but has the advantage it's only a few days away from Earth. You can go back and forth. We can learn about long-term consequences of living away from Earth. There are a lot of important minerals we can mine from the moon. We can start to work on creating feasible low-gravity manufacturing - which can spur other advances.

To me this whole "let's rush to Mars" without even having a moon base is just insane.

In fact, the moon is a lot more hostile than Mars. Off the top of my head: very little water, hardly any useful minerals, lunar night is long, temperature differences more intense, no air to stop micro meteorites, moon dust not weathered, so basically made of tiny shards of glass that sticks to everything electrostatically.

It is closer to earth though.

The moon may have more water than you think and it has several useful minerals - in particular titanium. The moon certainly has drawbacks, but it doesn't suffer from months-long sand storms and it is much closer to earth.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_resources

They're both quite hostile really! Given the choice (and no hope of a rescue mission) I still think I'd prefer Mars. Also gravity is 1/3rd rather than 1/6th.

Your chances of a rescue mission is much greater on the moon if we have multiple space stations with shuttles flying to the moon, and multiple moon bases in close enough proximity where one base can help out another if some crises were to occur.

We could potentially build this sort of earth-moon infrastructure out over the next few decades.