Do you think we will be able to create a city on Mars in next 50 years?

We could throw supplies and bodies at Mars now if we wanted to, it's mostly a question of will to pay the bill.

What we don't know is pretty much anything about how to make Mars survivable without constant resupply from Earth. We don't know what resources are available, how to extract them in that hostile environment, or how to process them into whatever we need to make. We don't have much practical experience building and maintaining sealed sustainable ecosystems, and what we know so far is "we can't do i

Do you mean that we will make a town? Or a village? A camp? An encampment? Does that mean 2 people? 10? 100? 1,000? 10,000? 100,000? What do they actually mean?

It seems like here in the U.S. we've had 16 years worth of bad economy while the politicians keep saying how good the economy is while most middle class people think "What planet are they living on?". The taxes that would be required to raise the money necessary to maintain a colony on Mars would be too much for the American people to shoulder. In my state the gas tax went up six months ago .20 cents a gallon because the transportation trust fund is depleted and the bridges and roads are falling apart and w

Can we as a species learn to cooperate and utilize the unlimited resources out in space? My ans

Technically, yes, it can be done and done a lot sooner than that but no because there are far too many Ship B people in this world directly or indirectly preventing progress like this.

It's one thing to send highly trained scientists to Mars, but to build a city you need to send hundreds or thousands of everyday construction workers, electricians, plumbers, etc. And then you need the people that support them. And farmers to grow food, and miners to get the minerals to manufacturer things.

I think at best, we could make a small complex of modules or maybe a building made out of pre-fab rooms.

Rather than No, Why not.

I think If Yes, How might be more interesting.

We may have some actual robotic manufacturing on Mars in 50...100 years and that may create the basis for a smaller village within a few decades. "City"? Not in the next 100 years for sure, and may take much, much longer.

We don't have the will to do it. It will require huge resources and put lives in extreme risk. The only country I think of that has the will to do it might be the Chinese and I think their lust for control over the Pacific will keep them occupied for the next 2 or 3 decades.

What value does Mars provide? It doesn't have a magnetic field to protect us from solar radiation. If we could jump-start the fission in the planetary core and get that started, then maybe other things could be done, but it would take years to terraform the planet. Otherwise, it's a dead-end destination, without 3He (which we can get from the moon and gas giants) or minerals (which we can get from asteroids), and a big gravity well. Yes, a shallower gravity well than Earth by a bit, but not much, and if w

Because Afghanistan, Syria, Uganda, Russia, Venezuela, Brazil, The United States, Libya, Azerbaijan, South Africa, The Congo, Korea, [...]

Mars is far away. Like, seriously, farther away than most people can imagine. The moon is on our doorstep, mars is on another continent. And in both you can't breathe or find anything useful for humanity to directly support survival without extreme ultra-reliable high-tech running flawless 24/7.

The biggest "ability" we are lacking is the economic one. Without that - as the Moon landings showed us - any progress would merely be a box-ticking exercise. Land a man on the Moon? Yup, done that. What's next.

And when you look at the economics of building a city on Mars, what the hell is the point? We don't build cities on terrestrial deserts, because the effort would be futile. And Mars is the most "deserty" of deserts. And as far as we know now, Mars has

At this point, there just isn't enough money to support such an endeavor.

And as much as it galls me to say this, if we turn back the clock a few centuries to the so-called "Age of Exploration," the truth is it was more the Age of Exploitation. The whole drive behind exploring and colonizing the New World was funded by those looking for economic return, not to expand knowledge and the human condition. It was all done in the name of profit, not glory. And worse, it was for short-term profit, not long-term gai

I could see getting a number of people transported there and living in a small bubble community. Maybe 500 at the most by then.

But something on the scale of thousands and beyond is a distant goal and would almost certainly first require true self sufficiency without supplies from Earth to pull off.

The solar system we live in is finite. If we are serious about the survival of us as a species, we need to put some eggs in a second basket. Going to the fourth rock from the sun won't help one iota aside from potentially being mildly educational. It's still the same basket.

It seems to me Mars is inhospitable and pointlessly close to earth. As a matter of scientific inquiry I could envision some sort of base there, but given the one-way rhetoric I doubt you'll find many enthusiasts to go there.

From my persp