Can we build on Mars?

[dukealien]

Can we build on Mars,
make it our home
once the seas rise

as when the Gorgonopsian roamed - 

with remembering eyes
look up at the dome 
protecting our biome
from micro meteorites?

There are far too many ways for the world to end.
Climate change is kindest. We can pretend
everything’s, normal, everybody lies,
until the bulk of humanity dies
and they dig up the bones of damned generations
before. Pat Boone will have a surprise in store,
or at least his corpse. The fields of Pars,
condensate rich, or Ghawar, will seal our doom -
sea levels rise, refugees swarm, nukes go boom boom.

And so we must build on Mars
a little room.

You raise, poetically, a very serious question:  without the spur of necessity, or at least the lure of profit, are we ever going to get off this dam' planet?  I mean, yada yada cradle forever.  But factually - which means, when things get real - climate catastrophe, sea level rise, even nuclear winter are bunk.  The numbers have been massaged for clicks (or their ancient equivalents) and political power.  That stuff will never produce a Manhattan Project/B-29/twenty aircraft carriers-all-at-once national effort because the motivation isn't there.  The catastrophe predictions are hogwash, and in our hearts we all know it.

Which leaves us with... what?  Musk wants to get to Mars and make it humanly self-sustaining because of  unexpected catastrophes for human life on Earth.  Even he is selling EVs (which are also, basically, bunk except as commuter pea-pods) and, more significantly, orbital flights to make money and test scalable hardware.  Shoot, the physicists and mathematicians will have figured out a warp drive before we can get far enough from Sol Three to test it safely.

Yes, I'm annoyed.  I'm used to the idea by now that I'm never going to get (back) to Mars in my lifetime.  But I do want to see Musk's face when the first humans set foot on the Red Planet and are met by a thoat-drawn welcome wagon with my triad's advertising on it.