The best way to get a full featured anything is to start with a Minimum Viable Product and improve it by degrees.

It's much easier to start with a dependent colony and slowly solve the dependency problems until it is actually independent. The earlier you start, the earlier it becomes feature complete.

Or, just a thought, we just wait 100 years (which is nothing on a cosmological, time-between-asteriods scale) and see what tech we have then.

Did Scott's and Amundsen's trips actually improve any technology that enables us now to have boring research stations at the southpole? It seems that the general scientific and economic progress just happened to also produce the means, as well as the reason to go there again.

Yeah, there's no way that we'd just haphazardly stumble into tech that would get us to Mars. You have to have a concentrated push for it, similar to the push required to get to the Moon.

Yeah, I'm not buying that. If your goal is to have a cache of humanity that survives x-risk scenarios, a dependent Mars colony is by definition not MVP because it is not V. For the enormous cost of building a human habitat in a distant gravity well, you've succeeded in protecting exactly 0 people against 0% of x-risk scenarios.

That sounds like exactly the sort of overinvestment in unproductive technology that MVP theory is designed to prevent.

We don't at present, yeah. That's a challenge. But it makes sense to have a goal to create a self-sustaining colony of humans (and plants/microbes/etc) on a different planet. Imagine that it did exist. It would be valuable to have, right?

Having such a goal and working towards it and developing the technology along the way looks like a coherent and valuable activity to me. It's not that I'm denying that it can't be done on Wednesday or in the next 5 years.

But yeah, it looks challenging.