On Mars a critical part of civilization will be the Sabatier Reaction. [1] It's a chemical reaction between CO2, which is widely abundant on Mars, and hydrogen.

On Mars a critical part of civilization will be the Sabatier Reaction. [1] It's a chemical reaction between CO2, which is widely abundant on Mars, and hydrogen. It yields methane and water. Things like this are so unbelievably convenient that it makes life almost feel like a video game where Mars is clearly just level 2. We'll need to start with a base amount of hydrogen, but getting more is also pretty straight forward using electrolysis, even directly on briny surface waters, the pure water from the reaction, or whatever other source. It's plentiful. So basic energy/water sources will be practically infinite. The reason I'm largely dismissive of things like radiation is twofold. The first is because we don't "really" know what the effects will be. It's not like we've intentionally exposed healthy people, in a large enough sample, to ever increasing radiation and then measured the effects. What we do know comes from observational studies which are going to provide weak and likely confounded evidence, and/or animal studies. The other is because life expectancy on Mars isn't going to be high. There will be significant numbers of deaths during colonization because there always are. Even simple construction projects tend to involve deaths and we're speaking of a major construction project done on another planet in circumstances we have no experience in whatsoever. The conclusion one can come to from the radiation is that people probably won't have an 80 year life expectancy, but that was already very much a given. Mars also will not be self sustaining for at least on the order of decades. The earliest experiments will obviously be geared towards 'in situ resource utilization' (ISRU) like scaling the Sabatier reaction, creating our own food, and so on - but these will be experiments and not necessities. The first voyages will bring enough food and other supplies to provide for survival and departure (and then some), independent of local resources, within the typical 2 years time frame. Ideally everything will go according to plan, but in reality it almost certainly will go wrong from day 0, and so that will be the assumption. The first habs themselves will also simply be the rockets we're landing in. The other questions I again just don't see as particularly relevant, even moreso in the context of a scenario where death will probably be a rather more frequent visitor than on Earth. They're also mostly happy problems. By the time you're trying to decide how to e.g. treat offspring with obscure birth defects, colonization has already been a booming success, and we'll leave it up to the Martians to do what they think is in their best collective interest. It's very likely that different value systems will emerge on the different settlements of humans, and I think this is a very good thing. Trying to impose our values on systems that are unlike anything we have experience of would simply be both arrogant and naive. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabatier_reaction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabatier_reaction