One indication that no one is even remotely ready to think seriously about colonizing Mars (including Space X): There are vast tracts of uninhabited land on earth, notably in the American West. Colonizing those would be vastly easier than colonizing Mars, and yet no one is even talking about that. A self-sustaining colony in the middle of the Nevada desert that was able to get by with no outside help for a few years would be about 1% as hard as colonizing Mars, and yet no one has done it, and no one AFAIK is planning to do it. This to me is the smoking gun that no one is really taking Mars colonization seriously. Everyone is caught up in the sexiness and glamour and no one wants to get down in the dirt and solve the really hard problems of how humans are actually going to survive when they are totally isolated from civilization for years.
Yes, I know about the HI-SEAS project. That was not isolated nor self-sustaining, and it only lasted 8 months.
That's actually not even the sort of thing I'm talking about. Forget simulating Mars. I want to see someone just colonize an uninhabited part of Earth without relying on help from the outside without any other constraints. Until we can do that, Mars is hopeless.
Yes, I know about the HI-SEAS project. That was not isolated nor self-sustaining, and it only lasted 8 months.
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/06/mars-sim...
That's actually not even the sort of thing I'm talking about. Forget simulating Mars. I want to see someone just colonize an uninhabited part of Earth without relying on help from the outside without any other constraints. Until we can do that, Mars is hopeless.