>Would there be value to it if we did it/tried really hard to do it/tried harder to have it happen sooner?

Yes.

>Is it the most valuable thing people could be working on right now?

No.

>Should we still have some people working on it?

Maybe a few dozen part time.

>Okay, but what about space colonization in general?

The moon seems like a cool and fun challenge, but still, are we cheerful about slightly slacking off here on Earth yet? There are some relatively chilly parts of Mercury we could try using to do something with solar energy collection.

>But... Mars just seems so tantalizingly in reach, and it seems to get people excited about doing stuff in space?

My guess is not really. Maybe you get a bare toehold, but it just seems like something that doesn't work out at all well anytime soon - with our level of sophistication, coordination, assets that can be deployed outside our gravity-well, etc.

@NevinWetherill hopefully the Mars colonization efforts can kickstart heavy space industry, which has potential for some very nice things

@AntonBogun I agree space based industry has the potential for nice things.

If we can name those nice things, why not just make that case?

Like, I think the way you get your spac-based industry started is by actually starting your space-based industry.

Maybe you have a direction and goal in mind, so you don't waste a $100 billion dollars doing something that'll end up obsolete in 25 years, but I'm very skeptical of this "just have a big flashy 'in this decade we will do X' project to sell to the ignorant public" thing.

Like, more normal people can observe more detailed and well-considered plans via science communication outlets and conclude that the paths and strategies make sense. Creating a one-line meme about colonizing Mars ends up just polluting the discourse, in my impression. People can notice that this is incredibly vague and difficult seeming, and that perhaps they're being misled about where we are in the process.

Maybe you can get a bunch of funding and hype for your No Man's Sky game by talking about a huge galaxy of unique planets and all those cool media tag lines, but eventually you're going to encounter people getting woke to the details and the actual state of progress on those promises.

Alternatively, you can do something like Star Citizen, and have a detailed roadmap of planned features, where you progressively update people on the stages of development and what new benefits are being realized at each stage.

Frankly, I intend to bet pretty heavily against anyone who looks like they've drunk the Kool Aid on Mars colonization. Solar power drops off on an inverse square, the atmosphere is insanely thin and the planet has no magnetosphere, it's already long trip through space without a good plan for rad-shielding, and frankly our rocket tech has not gotten at all close to "get humans from Earth to Mars without doing 100+ rocket launches and a huge expensive engineering project in LEO."

Like, sure, aim at colonizing Mars, but acknowledge that to do that specific thing well, you'd want to start with being able to accomplish a bunch of other stuff in space - like industry on the moon, or freezing then relocating some of the atmosphere of Venus with a huge solar reflector & launch system - or at the very least, the ability to shield Mars from the radiation bombarding it.

Just getting boots on the ground there is not the first and last step. You can probably put a human on Mars with maybe 10-50x NASA's current budget and a decade or two to work on it, but those humans will probably die there without a bunch of further investment, and even that toe-hold won't strengthen much after a century - and at some point you'd probably have to just wipe the slate clear, since terraforming is going to be way easier if you aren't needing to work around a bunch of stuff you've already put on the surface of the target planet.

This isn't something were you just spend a bunch of money to get stuff started, then you have an equivalent on an antarctic research station that just needs a dozen shipping containers sent there each year. More like Antarctica but it's heavily irradiated and sterile and years + dozens of rocket launches worth of travel away.

Just aim at a moon base? That seems way more like a good first step. Frankly, we could do more with robots on the moon, but if you need to have human bodies involved, that's where it feels like sending them will be achievable and most useful.