It would be simpler, cheaper, and easier to build a self-sufficient habitat orbiting Mars than to live on it. Even if you could build an atmosphere the lack of a magnetosphere would just see it blown away in the solar wind, if you even still cared after your cancer had cancer from the radiation.

If you want to figure out how to live and grow crops so far underground that solar radiation doesn’t bother you, Earth is a far easier place to do that, and equally resistant to asteroid impact and equally helpless to gamma ray burst.

When big houses became to common men built mansions, when mansions became too pedestrian men built castles on the sea in the form of yachts.

There are plenty of worthwhile reasons to explore and exploit the universe beyond our atmosphere, and in time I believe we will master not only the solar system but many others like it.

The ego of men is no longer a productive driving force for that. That works when the enemy is less powerful men. When the enemy is physics only a rational, long-term, consensual commitment can prevail.