why is he so fucking insistent on mars? mars is dogshit, there's nothing of value there. if you're gonna be a "humanity's destiny is in space" you can just fuckin build o'neill cylinders like gundam instead it would be way easier and just as "safe" (dangerous)
Big Mars fan here but also there's no way in hell it's even minimally independently habitable in 20 years lmao. Probably not self-sufficient in 200, it'll need Earth for a long, long time barring some Trek-like tech breakthroughs.
Energy I don't imagine would be the biggest problem (solar, nuclear, chemical reactors to produce fuel from available materials a la Mars Express plans), it's things like usable soil, organic stuff, spare parts that can be fabricated there for the first few decades, medicines, etc.
Just look into how difficult and global scale microchip fabrication is on earth and you quickly realize how every single tech tree here relies on a planets worth of material and labor.
