"The Mars colony would produce [service/good] to generate income sufficient to pay for the colony's upkeep / expansion."
Let's assume the colony itself is built by some idealist willing a trillion dollars to the project or something. Now that you have a base on Mars, how do the inhabitants pay to keep it going? Self sufficiency is too far fetched at this stage so they need regular supply shipments from Earth, so they need income of Earth currency.
Ok, you've described the problem again, but I'm trying to understand what a realistic answer would look like.
Let's say for instance that some answer were "handicrafts built from local, Martian materials" along with "YouTube channel revenue". Sounds unrealistic to me, but maybe people would be willing to pay $1M for a little puppet made on Mars, and they could ship them out by the ton. The economics on this are unusual.
I don't know. I honestly think Martian colonization just will not happen until we have a global, peaceful, prosperous civilization. Then it would just be funded by the global government in a similar way and for similar reasons as the antarctic stations.
> Now that you have a base on Mars, how do the inhabitants pay to keep it going? Self sufficiency is too far fetched at this stage so they need regular supply shipments from Earth, so they need income of Earth currency.
Emotional blackmail: “If Congress doesn’t pass the Martian colony funding bill, Americans on Mars will die”
National competition: “China’s Mars colony is bigger than ours”
Religion: “God wants us to send money to Mars” (that may sound bizarre, but religion motivates humans to spend fortunes on all sorts of strange things, maybe at some point one or more religions will latch on to Mars)
Let's assume the colony itself is built by some idealist willing a trillion dollars to the project or something. Now that you have a base on Mars, how do the inhabitants pay to keep it going? Self sufficiency is too far fetched at this stage so they need regular supply shipments from Earth, so they need income of Earth currency.