100 years optimistically!? That's an incredibly pessimistic timeline, maybe one of the most hardline "nothing ever happens" outlooks I've ever heard articulated.
i wouldn't say we've settled antarctica, which is on our planet and has air.
100 years would be a wild amount of time for us to settle mars.
Just as we will with Mars.
And yes we grow things there, even if just green onions and herbs.
Not to mention the reason for this isn't that it is insurmountable, merely that far better land is close by.
100 years is beyond pessimistic. We could easily have settled Mars with 1970s tech.
times a few orders of magnitude and this is the main reason to doubt a settled Mars colony.
Possibly a research outpost, but why would that be staffed by humans rather than robots?
Yet Mars is a new frontier, and endless, massive numbers of humans would go to Mars in a heartbeat.
Frankly, settlers travelling to the new world in the 1400s faced a far more dangerous journey and living conditions than a trip to Mars.
We're talking first explorers here, so many died on boats, of starvation the first year, on and on.
Modern tech does not remove said risk, but it tips the playing field.
If history teaches us anything, the biggest problem is supply chains - and supply chains have been so difficult to get right that they've led to countless famines, lost wars, failed businesses and economic crises. And those have all been supply chains here on Earth, mostly between fixed locations at fixed distances with relatively few environmental hazards and risks compared to space travel.
If we want to create a sustainable multi-planetary future, we need to solve this incrementally. Colonizing the moon would be a logical stopgap. But as it stands now we haven't even established a presence on the moon - let alone a permanent one. The only presence we have off-planet is the ISS and that one's still in Low Earth Orbit, no different from regular communication satellites, so that only qualifies as "off-planet" by not being on the surface of the planet.
Remember that we can't just scale up space travel indepently either. Even if SpaceX figures out how to do space launches every other day, that still requires a supply chain for fuel, parts, refinement, resource extraction, etc, all of which also needs to be scaled up accordingly. And that's just for launching stuff into space, which so far has mostly meant LEO.
I doubt there will be a permanent settlement in a thousand years.
You can't know when the leap will happen so it's basically picking a year that seems far enough off to be pretty darn sure.
Sure, it requires some research, engineering and a crapload of investment, but it doesn't require anything that is currently "science fiction".