If we are to send people to Mars then presumably we want some interaction with the surface. Otherwise we might as well send those people to underground bunkers on Earth.
You will find no shortage of volunteers for Martian colonists, but understand that for anyone who just wants to be alive somewhere, there's an endless quantity of undesirable places on Earth in which to live that are all still veritable paradises compared to literally everywhere on Mars.
About the only practical benefit of a Martian colony is to serve as a last-ditch backup of human civilization in the event of an asteroid strike. Mars won't be a powerhouse of industry, commerce, or culture; at best there will be some modest scientific output. It's a tomb world.
Give humanity a few millennia to build a Dyson sphere around the sun and maybe then you could start reasonably terraforming Mars into somewhere intrinsically nice to live, over the course of a few additional tens of millennia.
> Mars won't be a powerhouse of industry, commerce, or culture; at best there will be some modest scientific output. It's a tomb world.
I wouldn't go that far. Yeah, the habitability sucks, but it does have plenty of natural resources. Combined with the low gravity, I suspect it could be a useful manufacturing and refueling hub, especially as a pit stop on the way to the outer planets.
That said, I think Ceres is a bit more viable for that, due to closer proximity to the asteroid belt (since it's in the asteroid belt) and due to it being a giant ball of water ice and hydrocarbons (water and hydrocarbons being pretty crucial for both refueling operations and human colonization). If the gravity on Ceres ends up being too low for human comfort, that just makes it easier to build centrifuge habitats, be it on the surface or in orbit.
Yeah, science outpost (in the spirit of Antarctica or ISS) is what I have in mind when I think of humans on on Mars. And the interactions are more likely to be remote controlling rovers on surface than doing surface ops themselves.
