What do you think would prevent a self sufficient colony on Mars in a few hundred years? I don't see any fundamental obstacles to it.
It’s like the “self replicating” 3D printers where they can produce 98% of the structure by weight and approximately 0.001% by complexity. A base that’s producing it’s own food is doable, shipping machines to say build solar panels or a specific chip isn’t a problem.
However, even just the effort to figure out a minimal slice of earth’s technology to be self significant is hard. Aka building even a single type of LCD requires a massive number of different components, and the ability to build all the machines to make those components, and machines to make those machines, ... Now realize that’s just for an LCD, manufacturing every type of Medicine is a whole other list.
Finally you need to accept everyone on Mars living in relative poverty for generations due to the inefficiencies involved.
A good reference is Casey Handmer's blog or book.
https://www.amazon.com/How-Industrialize-Mars-Strategy-Self-...
https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2020/08/23/progression-of...
I think this point is by far the easiest one to address. Historically, there have always been people willing to do dangerous things (ie exploring the Arctic / Antarctica). I don't think you'd have any trouble finding people willing to give up their Earth lifestyle for a chance to explore the "frontier" even with the knowledge that they couldn't come back.
I doubt many people are willing to live the entirety of their lives in constant danger and constrained resources. And even fewer of those people will have the skills needed to run a complex technological society (and you will need a lot of technology to survive on Mars).
Yet a very large majority of North America is descended from people who did exactly that.
And those, who settled, came here looking for a better life, which should tell you about the conditions they were coming from.
And that is especially true for the many of the early colonists.
But the most important thing: we no longer live in the 1500-1600s which is a very important factor overlooked by everyone breathlessly talking about enduring hardships on Mars
I also think you take the idea of poverty way too seriously. People adapt to their environment remarkably quickly and the idea of poverty and wealth with it.
Also people now have much better mental picture of the manufacturing tech tree than ever before thanks to Factorio. ;-)
beside, earth manufacturing is biased toward efficiency and low cost, with the driver of capital gain, not sustainability, you don't actually need lcd if crt are good enough and could be manufactured in situ.
sure it won't make for a good nor a pleasant standard of living, but then again, that's moving the goalpost.
The US for example is below replacement rate, which is fine if you has constant immigration or it’s going to increase as the population falls. Less so if having 10% fewer people means everyone else dies.
Technology is only half the battle you also need to avoid negative feedback loops where if conditions are bad enough you don’t get doctors and surgeons immigrants. Which then makes things worse. A few year shift is fine for a token settlement, less so if you’re shipping 100,000 people there and 100,000 people back every year.