Not really - we now have the technological and resource window and we should use it. Wasting this opportunity could otherwise doom us forever if we can't get back to this level of capability again.
We have literally millions of years to prepare for that. Mars isn't a stepping stone, Mars is a stretch goal. A few hundred or even thousand years sooner or later is a rounding error in the kind of timeframe you're talking about.
At the current rate we don't have to wait for the sun to kill us, climate change will do that first. Sure, it might not be an extinction level event but societal collapse requires much less than that. Disruption of the supply chains needed to maintain a Mars colonization program requires even less than that.
> We have literally millions of years to prepare for that.
So do sea anemones. What are their chances of inhabiting Mars? ~0%.
You can have billions of years of spare time. If you only concern yourself with Earth and never move beyond it, you'll end up just like anemones
> Mars is a stretch goal.
If Mars is a stretch goal, we're fucked. By time of red giant sun Mars will also be toasted.
> climate change will do that first
It probably won't. Devastate and depopulate anything outside arctic circle? Yes.
Nuclear winter has a good chance but even that's not a certainty..
> societal collapse requires much less than that
I don't care about societies I care about totality of humans. All societies exist while their energy/work production can ballance the expanding complexity, or are knocked out of balance by another society.
What do you think where your Mars rockets come from? Who mines the raw materials? Who refines them? Who builds the tech? Who does the assembly? Who does the research to actually make Mars colonization possible?
"Societal collapse" is another way of saying you will not go to space today (or ever). I'm not talking about a society. I'm talking about our entire global economical and political system. Unchecked climate change will wipe out food production and make vast swathes of land uninhabitable.
For someone who seems to focused on human survival and creating self-sustaining life on Mars, you don't seem to have a very good understanding of supply chains (and in case you're unaware: everything has a supply chain, even modern agriculture can't function without entire industries producing its resources and equipment). You'll have a hard time establishing let alone maintaining that on Mars in the next million years if we can't maintain it on Earth in the next hundred.
If you want to ensure human survival, fix climate change first, then we can worry about Mars colonization.
>>So do sea anemones. What are their chances of inhabiting Mars? ~0%.
We were nothing more than sea anemones once too. In a billion years you could have literally any lifeform currently on earth evolve into intelligent beings capable of spaceflight. The timeframe is just so unfathomably long thah it's impossible to predict what could happen.
We had common ancestors with sea anemones. We weren't necessary anemones no more than anemones being humans. Parallel evolution led us here and anemones where they are.
> In a billion years you could have literally any lifeform currently on earth evolve into intelligent beings capable of spaceflight.
That depends on how likely is human-level intelligence to arise, so far only one species arrived there and no other. Then you add expectations of being able to build a spaceship capable of escaping Earth's gravity well.
Hoping some future intelligence can do job we can do now is ultimate form of procrastination.
There are probably at least 20 stereotypes/organizations objectively more dangerous than "crazy MAGA freak with a gun", but congratulations, you've contributed to political divisiveness on a tech-oriented forum!
> build a colony at the bottom of the ocean
Sun enters red giant phase. Oceans boil away. You boil with them, before being engulfed by the sun.
Mars is a stepping stone.