We can't even swing a self-sufficient (emphasis added) colony on the much more hospitable Antarctica. Short of that, anyone sent to Mars needs a handy supply o

We can't even swing a self-sufficient (emphasis added) colony on the much more hospitable Antarctica. Short of that, anyone sent to Mars needs a handy supply of cyanide capsules for the inevitable disaster. In the next twenty years, arrival of human meat on Mars is just bragging rights. Want exploration? We could do more of that with robots. Backup civilization? Simply not going to happen until we can get that Antarctica colony rolling. Nobody in, nobody out, allowance of once every two years robot-guided payloads under ten tons, and it has to run for forty years ... that is a good example of a colony. Realistically, we need things like autonomous self-replicating robot factories in the asteroids chucking payloads of metals onto designated landing targets on Mars, and their cousins maybe retrieving the odd iceberg from the Oort to make a long trip over. We'll need boring machines, Mars specials, that can leave sealed tunnels several yards underground where the radiation won't be as annoying. We will need to create thirty Biospheres a year here on Earth, each year a new generation, and learn from them. Thirty is a good number if you want to do stats and discount one-offs. And we'll have to start tweaking the genes on what is in those Biospheres to figure out what will make them compatible with, say, underground caverns built by those boring machines. This isn't like a trip to a remote island.