That's my point, it takes more than technology to inhabit a place. We might barely have the technology to live in Antarctica (or the middle of the Sahara desert), but it's still not economically feasible, there are no resources there that we need, and there's no social/societal need to be there. Even if we had the technology to safely get to Mars and viably live there (like aliens arrived and handed the technology to us), there's no point to doing it.

You wrote "We don't even have the capability to permanently inhabit Antarctica" - this is what I was disagreeing with.

There is also no compelling reason to build a manned base on the Moon, or try to build a city on Mars.