The SpaceX Starship is a big deal
Before colonizing Mars, colonize Antarctica. Antarctica is an overwhelmingly better place to live, and to move to, than Mars, on any axis you can name. Actually has air. Has lots of surface water. Has gravity. Is warmer! A flight there or back costs N thousands of times less, and you can get there in a day, not 4-10 months.That's not to say Antarctica is an appealing place to colonize. It's much, much worse than almost any other place on earth. But it's way better than Mars.Even the cloud tops of Venus are way better than Mars. But Antarctica is a way better place to be than Venus, too.Central Australia or the Taklamakan desert would be a picnic compared to Antarctica.Instead of making self-replicating potato-farming robots for Mars, make some for Earth, first. Turn them loose in a desert somewhere: Antarctica, the Sahara, Wrangel Island, or central Australia. I guarantee overwhelmingly better chances for success at any of those places than on Mars. If it would be too hard to do at any of those places, then it will be impossible on Mars.BFStarship has an interesting value proposition for something. Almost anything is a better choice than Mars missions. Delivering milk is a better value proposition. Blockade busting is a better value proposition. Launching communication satellite swarms looks like a good idea, but a viable use for the next dozen vehicles is harder to guess. A space elevator would use up a lot of launches, but that begs the question.Asteroid mining actually seems kind of plausible, in principle, but only if you have something to build out of it, there, like an interstellar generation ship. Nobody has any expectations for those to produce any value.