This topic is a bit of a sore spot for me.

I would agree that any notion of a large martian settlement (much less a comfortable one that people actually want to live in) on any shorter timeframe is not realistic and that Mars cannot be treated as a "plan B" in the case of climate change making Earth uninhabitable, but total dismissal of the idea (as well as the idea that humans will forever [and potentially should] be permanently Earth-bound) rubs me the wrong way.

Yes, it's an unfathomably difficult and complex project that should not be in any way underestimated. Realistically, it will take many decades at minimum and probably in excess of a century. That doesn't mean it shouldn't be attempted however, and it's not as if any of it will magically get easier in all the time spent not trying. This could wind up being a self-fulfilling prophecy sort of situation if it's allowed to be.

It’s an interesting article, but my advice is to skip the middleman and get a copy of the book discussed, ‘A City On Mars’. It’s entertaining, informative and well researched/cited. It’s also my go-to recommendation for people coming at this from a layperson/enthusiast perspective because the reasons why “colonize Mars anytime soon” is comical and an obvious lie once you dig in are complex. Unfortunately said reasons are multidisciplinary to the extreme so an overview in digestible form can be helpful for people who’ve been emotionally invested in this fantasy.

“We choose to go to /s The Moon /r Mars / not because it is easy but because it is hard.”

Kennedy was describing one of the most fundamental human ambitions; to try to achieve the impossible. Think pieces like this betray their fundamental lack of any ambition whatsoever

I liked‘A City On Mars’. That said I think it didn't have the right sense of scale. The Weinersmith's offered up a bunch of reasons why the eponymous city would never be possible but I think the most important bit - which they would concede I think - is that it's not Never but rather not any time soon.

200 years? 300? Timescales like that are going to create solutions to all the problems they listed. It's why they spend time knocking people suggesting we'll have boots on the moon in 50 years.

The modest stuff being done now - say setting up something equivalent to the various Antarctic bases on the moon seem like a reasonable step today towards something in the future.

See also Idlewords’ essays “Why not Mars” and “The shape of a Mars mission”

https://idlewords.com/2023/1/why_not_mars.htm

https://idlewords.com/2025/02/the_shape_of_a_mars_mission.ht...

““”Twenty years of tinkering with the much simpler systems on the space station have brought them no closer to reliability. And yet to get a crew to Mars, we’d need to get this stuff working like a Swiss watch. Humanity does not need a billion dollar shit dehydrator that can work for three years in zero gravity, but a Mars mission can’t leave Earth without it.“””

and his article l’affair siloxane:

https://mceglowski.substack.com/p/laffaire-siloxane

And Charles Stross’ “The High Frontier Redux” (2007)

http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2007/06/the-high...

“”” Mars is ... well, the phrase "tourist resort" springs to mind, and is promptly filed in the same corner as "Gobi desert". As Bruce Sterling has puts it: "I'll believe in people settling Mars at about the same time I see people settling the Gobi Desert. The Gobi Desert is about a thousand times as hospitable as Mars and five hundred times cheaper and easier to reach. Nobody ever writes "Gobi Desert Opera" because, well, it's just kind of plonkingly obvious that there's no good reason to go there and live.””””