“Please make sure you pay for your martian dream with your own money and not mine.”
Dude, your taxes are already paying for that trip. If you don’t like it, I would advise you to stop paying taxes. I think you’ll be the first to complain when commie china gets there ahead of us and declares the entire planet their property.
The depth of analysis on this forum never ceases to astound me. What value is in Mars that makes it worth the vast wealth consumed to get there (never mind get there and back which is about 100 times as expensive)? The rovers showed that Mars consists of rocks & dirt with almost no atmosphere 6/10 of 1 percent of earth's and a bit of ice.
I got new fer ya. We have rocks, dirt and ice here. Anyone could haul a load of rocks and dirt from North Dakota to wherever, but they don't because they have rocks and dirt just about everywhere you look. If you want rocks and dirt with some ice from a really cold place, then haul rocks and dirt from Antartica. But oddly enough no one does, because rocks and dirt just aren't worth hauling, and it is hundreds of thousands of times cheaper to haul a kg of stuff from Antartica than from mars. Try reading Sowell's primer on economics.
Personally I'd love to see the chinese spend vast quantities of wealth colonizing mars. It would do as good a job at impoverishing them as Mao's five year plans.