By all rights, this should be something I am deeply passionate about. I’ve been in tech/engineering my entire adult life and was obsessed with NASA as a kid. I even live on the east coast of Florida and can sometimes see the launches/landings over the ocean. But I just… don’t care at all. I’m not suffering from depression or any other malaise, and generally things are fine. But I haven’t clicked on a single link or looked at a single image. I know this has not been the case for many, many people, so I’m wondering what might be different about this launch (or really the whole program in general), and curious if anyone else has found themselves feeling the same.
Mars is not at all that inhospitable as you seem to think. It has all the resources: sunlight, CO2, water. There’s really not much more needed. The reason why Mars is a desert today is because life just never happened to have developed there, but if it had, it would be as inhabited as any fertile land is.
Just food and air.
Fertile? Martian land is not fertile. It is incredibly barren. Even if you somehow solved the atmosphere problem, you couldn’t grow things there.
Only earth has the soil needed to grow things. Eons of things dying and being processed by worms has transformed wide swaths of the planet into fertile soil filled with nutrients that plants can draw on. Martian land has none of that. It’s just rock and dust. Even the Sahara is more hospitable.
Processing Martian soil to be even remotely “fertile” would be very energy intensive even if you brought it back to earth. “Terraforming” the soil on Mars at scale would require massive amounts of material from Earth. And then you have the problem that Martian gravity is too weak to retain a breathable atmosphere, even if you could magically conjure up a planet’s worth of air.
Even if all of these problems could be solved, Mars has no oil since oil is also derived from life. What does it have beyond “sunlight, CO2, water?” Earth has all of that and so much more, in abundance.
I’m sorry but you simply don’t understand geopolitics at all, nor the sheer scale of what you’re imagining.