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.
PV cells also degrade pretty quickly. I would imagine even faster if exposed to Martian climate.
Also, the further you are from the sun? The less efficiently PVs produce.
If you want to bring power, you're probably gonna have to go Nuclear... but then you need water.
in space you have no shortage of room and if you can produce even low-efficiency PV cells en-masse it doesn't matter if you need thousands of square kms for reasonable power production
the perchlorates in mars' "soil" are definitely going to be one of the biggest problems. basically mars is exactly as deadly to human existence as the vacuum of outer space so why waste all of that energy getting yourself up off a gravity well only to fall down another one
