I am guessing this would lead to solar system-scale destruction? Putting a base on Mars doesn’t seem like it would do much to counter such an event if it headed our way?
Huge bursts of concentrated energy coming out of black holes are usually tight beams of high energy particles and light (x-rays, gamma rays) moving very fast and aligned with the object's poles. The focused beam of energy is what is deadly to life. If it's not tight and focused and moving fast, the energy dissipates out into space.
The solar system is huge and extends in three dimensions. A burst of energy that hit earth directly could miss Mars (or the moon, or the space around the earth and the moon) entirely. To sterilize a specific planet, the event has to be close (within like 10,000 light years I seem to remember reading) and the poles of the object undergoing the event have to be pointing at the planet.
Compared to interstellar distances, our solar system is tiny.
It seems to me that the long term payoff of colonizing Mars is huge.
The long term payoff of colonizing remote and inhospitable areas on earth is many, many orders of magnitude lower.
I can maybe rationalize that effort if we simply assume that those areas are similar enough to Mars that the experience and technology developed while doing it could be applied effectively.
But I'm not really convinced that most of that experience will transfer - The requirements to make a self-sustaining ocean colony or artic colony are wildly different from the tools and experience we'll need for Mars. At best we gain some general insights, but we'd still have to spend enormous resources developing the right tech and tools for Mars.
Doing these things are still ludicrously ambitious projects, and yet colonizing Mars is at least an order of magnitude more ambitious.
Not true for "is/was there life on other planets in the solar system".
For Antarctica (which is not the Arctic, but I assume what you meant - Scandinavia is quite self sustaining!) you have the Antarctic Treaty System. [1] The TL/DR there is that pretty much every form of development in Antarctica is illegal, and you're not allowed to leave any waste whatsoever. When an antarctic researcher is on a mission, they're required to bottle up their feces/urine and bring it back to base. The urine is processed and then returned to the sea. Feces are generally returned to the host nation for local removal. Mining and other industry is expressly prohibited.
But something even more interesting is comparing Antarctica to Mars, even ignoring the treaty system. Mars has two big things going against it: radiation, and a negligible atmosphere. That means you need to limit your exposure outside, and when you do go outside it needs to be with appropriate equipment and clothing. Of course the exact same requirements also hold true of Antarctica, though to a lesser degree.
But it also has quite a lot of things going for it. Mars day/night cycle is identical to Earth and it even has near identical seasons owing to a near identical tilt. Antarctica, by contrast, has what is basically a 6 month long day/night cycle. And the weather is absolutely vicious. There are genuinely violent snowstorms, as well as temperatures that average -30F, and much lower on the inner areas away from the coasts. By contrast temperatures on Mars (depending on what part of the planet you're on, and when) can get right balmy. Summer on the equator? It gets up to about 70F, though the nights are still extremely cold owing to no atmosphere.
But the snow storm part is one of the more interesting comparisons. Maybe the biggest thing is "The Martian." The key plot event there was a terrible sand storm on Mars ravaged their base and setup the plot for the rest of the film/movie. The Martian itself is a hard sci-fi book. This is one of the very few things that was intentionally faked. The worst sandstorm on Mars would feel like a slight breeze owing to the negligible atmospheric pressure. Think about that - a hard sci-fi book had to resort to fantasy to create a meaningful disaster!
There's a lot more to say/compare as well, but this is already getting a bit too long. Suffice to say, these issues are extremely counter-intuitive, but also extremely interesting to explore!
I think of Biosphere 2, where trees fell down because we didn't know that we didn't know that wind is required to make trees strong enough to support their own weight. I'm sure there's a lot more we dont know that we dont know.
But I mean more of a self-propagating civilization, a group of people learning to draw on the resources throughout the solar system to stay alive and raise the next generation. More about building a dynamic growing system than a perfectly balanced one. To raise a solar-system sized super-organism of humans. The space termite mound.
One can imagine a Mars that's been terraformed and grown to a population of 1 billion people in the very distant future. But at that point I expect most of the mechanism of technological civilization to live inside AIs rather than human heads.
If you imagine a colony of just 1 million people on Mars that's pretty doable in the medium term. But it's only a very narrow range of disasters that would reduce Earth's population to less than a million and not also spill over to wipe out Mars's more fragile civilization as well.
Every time somebody says that, I remember of this:
We have no idea what Type II or III adversarial civilization will be able to do to us, and how fast.