That is overly sentimental and romantic and doesn't match reality. The effort to sustain life on Mars is more than we know, and it is much, much, much, much mor

That is overly sentimental and romantic and doesn't match reality. The effort to sustain life on Mars is more than we know, and it is much, much, much, much more effort to sustain life on Mars (even if we knew how to do it) than it is to address our problems here on Earth. And say we go to Mars, which we can basically simulate here on Earth anyway. How does that get us closer "to the stars"? If we can't survive here on Earth, literally the most perfect habitat for us, then what in the world is the point of "going to the stars", whatever that means in the first place? What are we going to do there? Destroy whatever secondary Earth we find? What physics is there to say that we can even get to another solar system before we destroy the habitability of the Earth? We can "go to the stars" without sending man out first. I still see no current reason to send humans to Mars other than to waste resources. > Whether it happens in a hundred years or a thousand years or a million years, eventually our Sun will grow cold and go out. Yea, and that's a minimum of 400-500 million years out, and it's going to get a lot hotter before it goes cold. And umpteen million other things on Earth, such as the geological structure, will have drastically changed by then. You shouldn't act like humanity actually has the ability to effectively worry about such a date when we can't even do most stuff today with any longer than a year or two horizon. The likelihood of disaster, such as asteroid or meteor impact or a Venus-type situation or other ecosystem collapse scenarios, before the Sun exhausts itself is basically 99.<however many 9s you want>%. Going to Mars doesn't give us anymore data on how to escape the Sun's evolution. And I highly question any claim that humanity even has the ability to be an interstellar species, which is a separate question from capability.