> It's super hard compared to fixing Planet Earth.
I don't think that's true. Most of Earth's problems are political, with humans in charge exercising their power on purpose to make pollution on Earth worse. On Earth you are fighting against rich and powerful people who want the pollution to get worse (because it temporarily 'enriches' them, ugh). This is happening at an accelerating rate.
There is no such challenge on Mars to overcome. Nobody is arguing (with any power) that we should not terraform Mars, but even the US President thinks that Earthly climate change is a 'hoax' invented by the Chinese to specifically harm America. THAT is what prevents progress here, not technological development.
We have technology to 'fix' Earth today and to 'terraform' Mars soon. The main issue on Earth is that the people with the power to do something good are choosing to bad instead.
What makes you think that on Mars there won't be politics? Once Mars is within reach politics will arrive with the first human settlers.
What the US president believes is not representative for what politicians in general believe. He's somewhat of an exception (fortunately). Unfortunately, he's doing a lot of damage but even if he weren't the problem would largely remain the same.
That's exactly how it'll go. At some point, humans on Mars will become tribal. Then we can watch history repeat from a distance (all the while it is repeating here anyway...)
I agree with you that the problem is largely political (though I think because of that the technology is lagging too). But even if we conduct huge engineering efforts to let humans 'live' on Mars, there are still several orders of magnitude between the pleasantness of life there and here.
Terraforming Mars is a gigantic project. We might be slow in fixing problems on Earth, but in general we do fix them. Even if we get to our senses in 2100 after a global nuclear war and when climate change has ran away in extreme levels, reverting it is still much easier than terraforming Mars.
I don't think that's true. Most of Earth's problems are political, with humans in charge exercising their power on purpose to make pollution on Earth worse. On Earth you are fighting against rich and powerful people who want the pollution to get worse (because it temporarily 'enriches' them, ugh). This is happening at an accelerating rate.
There is no such challenge on Mars to overcome. Nobody is arguing (with any power) that we should not terraform Mars, but even the US President thinks that Earthly climate change is a 'hoax' invented by the Chinese to specifically harm America. THAT is what prevents progress here, not technological development.
We have technology to 'fix' Earth today and to 'terraform' Mars soon. The main issue on Earth is that the people with the power to do something good are choosing to bad instead.