Especially since a Moon colony would make building and sending future stuff sooo much easier, a very big part of what we work on now and what costs us money (th

Especially since a Moon colony would make building and sending future stuff sooo much easier, a very big part of what we work on now and what costs us money (the big decider, whether we like it or not) is "how do we get that off of Earth and into space". If we could assemble on the Moon first, Mars and beyond would be much easier to reach. And for almost everything that is not launching related (radiation, resources, ...) a Moon colony faces the same difficulties with better recovery possibilities in case of catastophic failure, so it's a better learning ground (I mean, if your food producing bio dome or whatever dies for some reason you probably want to be on the Moon with emergency supply very close rather than out there on Mars). The only downside I see is that a Moon colony would not offer the same quality of "backup for civilization" as Mars would, and it's also a harder sell on the public and politician I think.