I understand, it&#x27;s just that your comment made me doubt whether going to Mars is a good idea at all :)<p>Why I thought that going to Mars might not be a great idea (yet):<p>NASA&#x27;s budget is about 17 billion so lets guesstimate that going to Mars will cost 100 billion. It&#x27;s probably a lot more to establish a colony, let alone a self sufficient colony. What is the benefit of having a colony on Mars? We aren&#x27;t lacking space on Earth; it would be a lot easier to colonize the Saharan desert than to colonize Mars. Instead that money could go to scientific research (e.g. renewable energy generation, medical research, AI research, robotics research), or to some other cause. Wouldn&#x27;t that be of much greater benefit to humanity?<p>If you&#x27;re looking purely at space exploration it also seems to me that there are better ways to spend that money than to put humans on Mars. For the same money we could probably put a whole bunch of telescopes in space and send several probes&#x2F;rovers to asteroids&#x2F;planets&#x2F;moons.<p>Even if the ultimate goal is to establish a colony on Mars, it might be a better strategy to build it with robots than with humans...?