An independent settlement has to locally manufacture all its food, consumable supplies and broken equipment. Since it can’t realistically trade anything with Earth, it must have a self-sustaining closed economy.
Most of stuff we consume in our everyday lives, even food, is the product of complex industrial processes, involving large factories that use lots of energy, many different kinds of resources that come from every corner of the world and lots of labour, exploiting economies of scale. The type of stuff that would be needed on a Martian settlement would be even much more hi-tech. There is no practical way to do all this hi-tech manufacturing on a small scale in a hostile, resource starved environment with current technology.
Keep in mind that even most of the Earth surface is uninhabited. There are no permanent settlements in the middle of the Sahara desert, or at the South Pole, or in the oceans. Anything like that would be way more technologically feasible that a space settlement, it wouldn’t even need to be fully independent, yet we don’t settle there.
EDIT:
if we were to start pouring in several billion dollars a year in research.
For reference, the ISS already costs several billion dollars a year, and it’s far from independent. NASA estimates that a manned mission to Mars would cost about 100 billion dollars.
An independent settlement has to locally manufacture all its food, consumable supplies and broken equipment. Since it can’t realistically trade anything with Earth, it must have a self-sustaining closed economy.
Most of stuff we consume in our everyday lives, even food, is the product of complex industrial processes, involving large factories that use lots of energy, many different kinds of resources that come from every corner of the world and lots of labour, exploiting economies of scale.
The type of stuff that would be needed on a Martian settlement would be even much more hi-tech. There is no practical way to do all this hi-tech manufacturing on a small scale in a hostile, resource starved environment with current technology.
Keep in mind that even most of the Earth surface is uninhabited. There are no permanent settlements in the middle of the Sahara desert, or at the South Pole, or in the oceans. Anything like that would be way more technologically feasible that a space settlement, it wouldn’t even need to be fully independent, yet we don’t settle there.
EDIT:
For reference, the ISS already costs several billion dollars a year, and it’s far from independent. NASA estimates that a manned mission to Mars would cost about 100 billion dollars.