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