Some important differences:

- Sailing to New England didn’t cost a trillion dollars.

- The expedition wasn’t live-streamed to every pocket back in England.

- People didn’t know what could be found in America. There was a sense of adventure. In contrast, we know what’s on Mars and the answer is basically “nothing”.

No single journey to New England cost a trillion dollars but neither does a single manned trip to Mars. Over time hundreds of ships brought thousands of people to dozens of colonies. Ships kept bringing people even after the colonies were self-sustaining. How much did european colonization of the east coast cost?

History is full of people selling everything and taking a one way trip into a new frontier.

> How much did european colonization of the east coast cost?

Not a lot. People actually paid to move there because it resulted in a significant improvement in living conditions/income/etc. on average (besides the few earliest attempts). Colonization and exploration was almost entirely driven by profit union at least the 1800s or so.

Colonizing Mars wouldn’t be even remotely comparable in almost any way to what happened in the Americas/Australia/etc.

> selling everything and taking a one way trip into a new frontier.

Yeah, because there was a lot of free land there/natural resources/high demand for labor etc.

> People didn’t know what could be found in America. There was a sense of adventure

To be fair they kind of did. Or rather they never expected to finding anything extremely different to what they have experienced in Europe (besides very low population density and all the benefits resulting from that).

> How many European colonies failed in the new world?

In at least one case the failure of the colony resulted in the country which founded it being forced into a slightly one-sided merger with its nearest neighbour, which is why the British flag now has blue in it.

Modern nations may be mindful of this and wish to avoid repeating the mistake. On the other hand, they may have a case of the FOMOs after looking at how successful the USA became… at least if they convince themselves their new space colony won't also declare independence just like the USA did.

> Modern nations may be mindful of this and wish to avoid repeating the mistake

Considering that colonies on Mars are extremely unlikely to ever be self-sustainable that’s hardly a concern (in fact the opposite might be preferable).

Comparing the US (or any country or place that’s inhabited on Earth, besides maybe Antarctica but even that is not even remotely close) to a potential colony on Mars is beyond absurd.

When you say "extremely unlikely" and "beyond absurd", the mistake you're clearly making is to assume tech doesn't change much if at all.

"The ability to colonise Mars does not currently exist" is true, but tells us next to nothing about what will be possible if we put effort into the attempt, just as the fact that the ability to achieve the goal of "landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth" did not exist on May 25, 1961, but the attempt taught us many things including that (and how) we could.

Likewise for colonies, when Columbus set sail everyone knew the world was round, and almost everyone even knew how big it was (except, ironically, Columbus). What nobody knew was that America existed, and if America had not existed then none of the ships that existed at that time could make it all the way to where Columbus thought he was going.

It's the unknowns that hold us back from Mars, but at the moment the only reasons I have to suspect a Mars colony would fail are the black swans, not the problems currently being worked on.

It’s not about technology, it’s about incentives. Unless the cost of settling and living in Mars becomes extremely low there will be no rational reason to invest into any large scale Martian colony.

Why don’t you move to Antarctica? We have the technology that would allow use to settle millions of people there. We don’t, because it’s cold, there is nothing to do there and there much nicer places to live further north. In the case for Mars multiply all of that including the cost by (idk) 1000? 10000 times?

> Likewise for colonies

I don’t see the analogy here at all. Yes Columbus took a risk, he did that because he and his investor expected to make a lot of money just like the Portuguese going around Africa did. How is that relevant?

Europeans colonized America because it was green, warm, full of resources and otherwise about as nice as Europe (just with a lot less people due to various reason). OTH nobody colonized Antarctica or the northern half of Greenland etc. due to obvious reasons..

I'd agree about the economics; when Musk suggests people getting out a loan to make the trip, what bank would grant that loan? How would they collect on it? What's Mars going to sell to Earth, which it needs to in order for a bank on Earth to accept a repayment? When he says "People will want to create the first pizza joint [on Mars], the first iron ore factory", that makes me cringe — the former because it's the kind of low-income role that needs food stamps in California (or at least, I know someone, n=1, where that was the case) and can't possibly afford that trip even with his price optimism, and the latter because if that's not already fully automated before you arrive, you probably can't build the colony in the first place.

I do however expect that there's enough psychological draw from "the final frontier" to get a million people spending $100k USD for the trip. Can he get that cheap? No idea.

> I don’t see the analogy here at all. Yes Columbus took a risk, he did that because he and his investor expected to make a lot of money just like the Portuguese going around Africa did. How is that relevant?

Because what he was actually aiming for wasn't possible, he just got lucky there was a (just about possible) alternative that he happened to find purely by coincidence.

What I'm expecting, is that we get von Neumann replicators before a Mars colony reaches the current population of Greenland (56k), let alone a million, and also that a lot of people will prefer the Moon instead (the ways in which the Moon is harder are not ones I expect to be important compared to the difficulty of either). But I also expect that some random thing which gets invented specifically as a result of the attempt to colonise Mars to prove really useful in some impossible to predict way.

> the new world

How is that relevant at all? The only thing that comes close to mars are mostly self-sustainable colonies (not a thing) in Antarctica (which is still a more habitable place than Mars by several magnitudes).

> we did the last time we explored a new frontier

Because the cost was relatively extremely low and there were practical reasons to do that?