No human being has ever settled in a place which was not previously the habitat of a billion years of successful organic life-- and we have failed to settle in a number of places which are.
To think of Mars as just the new New World is a romantic idea, but there is no basis for the comparison. Populating another world will be the most significant undertaking of humanity by orders of magnitude; to assume it can be done while it remains to be seen whether we can survive as a species on a planet with an atmosphere which is exactly what we breathe, which is made of as much water as we are, of the same phase ours is, where food grows in the ground all by itself and we are nearly completely protected from debris large and small, and with a legacy of billions of years to prove it can be done-- well, I'd ask to know your reasoning.
We're smart. We live almost entirely in structures and cities that are very remote from the idyllic world you describe. When was the last time you saw your food grow?
There are technological hurdles to living on Mars, but not much we already don't know how to handle. Food, water, air - that's the minimum, and thats not all that hard given raw materials and energy, which is abundant on Mars.
...really? How many cities run on recycled air produced from rocks? On recycled water from melted permafrost? With 100% solar power? Eating entirely food grown using the same? With the risk that if any ine of those things fails, everyone living there will certainly die?
To this you compare the fact that I eat cows fed grass from a hundred miles away, brought to me using energy we literally just dug out of the ground? That I drink water piped from a giant lake all of halfway across the county?
If anything, you support my point: what passes for "remote" and "inhospitable" on Earth is unbelievably luxurious by the standard of anywhere else. Even Death Valley gets rain. Even Antarctica has oxygen. Talk to me about your plans for a self-sustaining colony in one of those places, and then we can talk about how many times -- how many orders of magnitude -- harder and more expensive it will be to do the same thing on Mars.
I'll just answer with this: nobody who goes will be thinking like that. Sure there are problems, but really, all of them are solvable - we're not 16th-century folks grappling with science, we're 3rd-millenium folks with centuries of science behind us.
Graphene filters to purify sublimated water-ice. Solar cells manufactured from sand and plastic. Oxygen siezed from rocks, lots at first but then just recycled thru green growing things.
Plenty of folks starved in the New World when their support systems ran out, doesn't matter whether it was oxygen or food, dead just the same. The point is, they were willing to take the risk with a whole continent to win.
Now its a whole planet! With different challenges, different storms and temperatures. Without challenges like locusts, floods, communication issues, pesky natives to deal with.
Hawaii isn't too badly populated for being 28 million years old.
Life quickly develops on any new land that appears on Earth. But without Oxygen I'm skeptical that we could accomplish similar on Mars in the near future.
To think of Mars as just the new New World is a romantic idea, but there is no basis for the comparison. Populating another world will be the most significant undertaking of humanity by orders of magnitude; to assume it can be done while it remains to be seen whether we can survive as a species on a planet with an atmosphere which is exactly what we breathe, which is made of as much water as we are, of the same phase ours is, where food grows in the ground all by itself and we are nearly completely protected from debris large and small, and with a legacy of billions of years to prove it can be done-- well, I'd ask to know your reasoning.