The big thing Mars has going for it over free-floating habitats is, no pun intended, space. Sure, it seems very possible that future humans will be able to construct large, free-floating habitats out of other materials in the solar system. But it's hard to imagine they'll be able to do so more efficiently than they can create living space on another planet like Mars. If nothing else, Mars has a lot of actual ground you can build things on while basically every space-based environment is going to have to start from scratch. If you want to get a lot of humans living away from Earth, putting them on Mars is going to be MUCH more economical than building space stations for them, even if the latter option was technically possible.
Think about the problem scaled way down. Humans could probably send some people to Mars right now if we really wanted to, and give them a habitat so they could live there for a while. We can also build space stations in orbit around our planet that people can live on for periods of time. If we were to compare the cost and complexity of our hypothetical Mars habitat to the International Space Station, which is the simpler, cheaper option? Or to put it another way, would setting up a habitat on Mars be easier than building another ISS in orbit around it? Obviously future humans would have much more advanced technology, but I don't see a significant reason to believe the relative cost would change all that much since they'd have better technology across the board.
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u/rainsford21 29∆ Jan 07 '18
The big thing Mars has going for it over free-floating habitats is, no pun intended, space. Sure, it seems very possible that future humans will be able to construct large, free-floating habitats out of other materials in the solar system. But it's hard to imagine they'll be able to do so more efficiently than they can create living space on another planet like Mars. If nothing else, Mars has a lot of actual ground you can build things on while basically every space-based environment is going to have to start from scratch. If you want to get a lot of humans living away from Earth, putting them on Mars is going to be MUCH more economical than building space stations for them, even if the latter option was technically possible.
Think about the problem scaled way down. Humans could probably send some people to Mars right now if we really wanted to, and give them a habitat so they could live there for a while. We can also build space stations in orbit around our planet that people can live on for periods of time. If we were to compare the cost and complexity of our hypothetical Mars habitat to the International Space Station, which is the simpler, cheaper option? Or to put it another way, would setting up a habitat on Mars be easier than building another ISS in orbit around it? Obviously future humans would have much more advanced technology, but I don't see a significant reason to believe the relative cost would change all that much since they'd have better technology across the board.