Space Karen's fans be like

just send all the billionaires to mars and the rest of us will have to learn how to survive without them

More like Celebrate.
...Learn?
- That's a common misspelling of "thrive".
But without the Galts, our society will fall apart! /s

both are not mutually exclusive

Yep. People definitely want to colonize the first one. The only thing keeping apartments off that location is strict governmental regulation of space like that. The desire is definitely there though.

The poor moon, it gets skipped over. Doesn't it deserve to be colonized too? Maybe we could put an amusement park there or something.

Ooh! It could have animatronics that sing songs about what it was like being a whaler on the moon!
- Or farming space beetles on the half of the planet your family owns
We would eat our way through in no time

Shhhh!!! 🤫 This the best chance we have to get rid of a bunch of them all at once

I don't think anyone deserves to be a space slave to Musk.
- Nah, he can take his simps. They won't be missed. Half of thrm are fascists anyways.
- What about Elon Musk or other billionaires?

I don't think space travel is inherently a bad idea. But I don't think it'd be the billionaires to get us there, especially not someone like Elon.

SpaceX is a rocket ship manufacturer, NASA outsourced that like the US military outsources aircraft manufacturing to Boeing or Lockheed Martin.

Elon is not going to/was never going to "get us there" he's just the guy who owns the company that makes the vehicles. Idk what this huge miscommunication is and how people got to the idea that he's personally going to be the one who pushes humanity to mars, he doesn't even have a say in the operations NASA uses his spacecraft for.
- Elon used to say he was going to found a Mars colony. I don't pay much attention to him so maybe he doesn't talk about it anymore, but it was a big thing maybe fifteen years ago.

Me (a sysadmin): We need an off-site backup. Preferably in a completely different "availability zone".

I love the thought of being one of the only programmers on Mars. Being able to say: "I'm gonna do it my way. What are you gonna do, travel to Mars?", when some comes up with a stupid request, would be absolutely priceless.

Okay, but The Planet Crafter is really cool for exactly that reason. You slowly but surely make a barren wasteland livable, it's extremely rewarding

Edit: I may have misunderstood the intention of this meme, but I still stand behind Planet Crafter being a fun game

Meanwhile on earth we are slowly but surely making a livable planet a barren wasteland

For money

For like 400 massive douchebags
- Yeah, pretty much. What was the name of that movie? Oh yeah, Elysium. That's probably what's going to happen, isn't it

It's not about prime real estate, it's about increasing the redundancy of humanity's survival. Two planets are better than one.

There seems to be a large amount of overlap between people who say things like "It's hubris to think that humans can change the atmosphere of the earth enough to make a noticeable difference in 400 years" and "we can make Mars inhabitable by humans in 50 years"
- What the fuck, no there isn't. Are you actually implying most people that are interested in a mars colony are climate change deniers?
- It's also not about Terraforming! That's a goal for a few thousand years down the line. For now, just spreading out our habitats is a good idea.
- I could say the same about the opposite position
In order to colonize mars, having a good space station in orbit would help out immensely. We're talking big enough to stretch out and hold a few hundred people.
The station would need to grow crops and have minor but flexible manufacturing.
At that point, why would you colonize mars vs just make more stations?
- For real, resource extraction is a big one. Finding ice means they can make, besides water, oxygen and rocket fuel. Not to mention that shelters for radiation are incredibly hard to make without a huge amount of mass, which we cannot efficiently get into orbit without a space elevator. Hence being able to extract it from the location of the colony, say dig into the ground or build thick walls with bricks made from soil, is necessary for long term survival of the inhabitants. I think it is cool that due to these reasons having air balloons over Venus might even be a better option due to it having a protective atmosphere.
- Space stations don't produce raw materials, even if they could self sustain their human populations with food grown onboard they'd require the resources of earth to build and expand, so they're still dependent on Earth.
  
  A space station wouldn't make anything inherently easier, unless it was attached via space elevator just having a chunk of metal in orbit doesn't change how much energy you need to get things out of the gravity well.
- Mining is a big reason. And radiation shielding, as others have said.
- Right now, even with water recycling systems, we still have to ship water to the ISS. A planet or moon also offers way more radiation protection by tunneling underground than any spacecraft at this time could provide.
  
  I'd say we go for Deimos and Phobos first and set up mining operations there before spreading to the Martian surface. Their super-low gravity will make shipping materials easier. They essentially are natural space stations, just add infrastructure.
Space colonies are cool but we're nowhere close to being able to make a self-sustaining colony
Who cares about human survival without Earth?

Doesn't sound like a life to me
- Star Trek even without Earth would be pretty nice.
While I fundamentally agree, it's inevitable that Earth and Mars would go to war in that scenario.
- Why is it inevitable? We don't even have a colony there let alone a government and you think it would inevitably lead to war?
  
  Put down the sci fi novels for a second.