Any possible Mars effort is dwarfed by the huge amount of bullshit we do otherwise. There are lots of very bright people working in the Finance industry. In another world they would be perfectly capable of doing physics, engineering etc. Even the people who are engineers right now mostly work on bullshit consumer crap. Don't get me started about ad tech. This list goes on and on. There's lots of people who would have been capable of a STEM jobs or even basic research, but landed in some other bullshit job for whatever reason. I refuse to believe that we are using our resources wisely. And about materials, there is no technical reason that one needs to replace a phone every two years. Unrepairable bluetooth headsets. IoT crap. Cars that let you browse twitter...