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Something vaguely similar to what would convince them to crowd aboard a rickety wooden ship to cross the ocean to an untamed wilderness or buy a Conestoga Wagon and head 'west' braving various dangers and risks to stake a dubious claim on some land.
There's some subset of the population who have a different (arguably, defective?) risk calculus/tolerance when it comes to tackling new frontiers. It seems likely that >1% of the population is willing to sign on for such a trip with relatively dubious reward.
The tricky part, from my view, is that we'd need some of the best, brightest, and most adaptable, and they might be in shorter supply.
The cheap and easy answer is to what would motivate such action is to assume we send automated drones ahead to make things habitable and reasonably pleasant before the average biological human travels there.
In my mind, a probable option is the creation of O'Neil cylinders that are very directly optimized for some particularized environment which would make them extremely appealing for long-term habitation. One thing humans have consistently been willing to uproot and relocate for is desirable places to live.
Instead of retiring down to Florida or going on nonstop cruises, for example, I could imagine a dedicated "retirement orbital" which can house millions upon millions of septuagenarians while guaranteeing they all get to live on waterfront property, have sunshine and temperate climate year-round, and have minimal risk of crime or external diseases sweeping in.
You say this is an overly ambitious project which would require an obscene amount of resources and labor to construct, and you're right. I counter by pointing out that mankind has already built The Villages and similar communities across the state of Florida and elsewhere at great economic cost, so really I'm just proposing we scale up a model that has already been proven.
This partially solves the issue of who would be willing to risk it. Older people who have lived their life might not mind a risky trip to the place of endless bliss, even if it does make it nigh-impossible for the grandkids to visit.
My tongue is in cheek when I say this, but my larger point is that starship is a necessary step if we want to figure out what viable business models might be available in space.
Heading west has lots of risks, but requires few resources (especially, few resources by the standards of people who don't use electricity or plumbing) If it took a million dollars or even $50000 to head West, nobody would have done it.
Yes, but that's why I think it is fair to speculate that Starship bringing launch costs down might be a sufficient catalyst to get people interested in traveling out there.
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It seems like some of the precursor missing technologies are obvious, but comparatively few are working on them. I'm thinking small-scale closed-loop habitats: Biosphere 2 was cute, but it mostly failed as an experiment and wasn't even a reasonable size for space colonies. I think we're quite short of the required technology, but it seems a fairly easy experiment to run iteratively on Earth to get there.
Biosphere 2 is not a good model for a planetary colony, which would undoubtedly make use of planetary resources to supply themselves and dispose of waste likewise.
That's probably true, but I think it is a reasonable model for a long-term space station or asteroid colony, which has long seemed to me more appealing than planets, especially in the short term. The bottom of a gravity well seems like one of the least economically useful niches, unless you really can't find enough raw materials on moons and asteroids, or unless you have a serious proposal for terraforming.
More to the point: if you want to build a space colony, starting iteratively on closed-loop environs (assume spin gravity, which I've been told is practical for station designs not much larger than the ISS) seems a low cost, relatively low-risk research effort we could be doing more of today.
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Interesting comment -- so you think a BS3 could be made to work if 'import of any resource somewhat easily available on Mars' and 'throw whatever you want out the airlock' were allowed?
Yes, I would think so. You could replenish oxygen and reject CO2, which was the main difficulty as I recall. Maintaining a closed environment is not that hard if you can add and remove gasses, just look at nuclear subs.
"Replenish oxygen" is non-trivial on Mars/Luna though, no? (and decidedly so for any space-based hab)
These take on bottled O2 at port AFAIK? This is not a thing that's available in space.
Replenishing O2 from Mars air is something we did in a demo experiment (MOXIE) 3 years ago. On Luna it gets a bit more expensive; although oxygen is everywhere in the soil you'd need a lot of power to bake it out.
Other volatiles can also be found in Mars air but are even tougher on the moon. Mining dirty ice (icy dirt?) from a south pole crater does not sound like a fun way to replenish nitrogen.
Nuclear subs make O2 by electrolysis of sea water easily enough, but I think the CO2 removal (via chemical separation and dumping) must be harder, since they leave the ambient levels fairly high, and actually obtaining the O2 from the CO2 must be harder still or they'd be doing that for simplicity instead. Getting O2 from CO2 is easy enough with hydrogen and energy, but that leaves you with methane too - great if you want rocket fuel on Mars but just as much of a PITA to dump as CO2 if you're trying to be stealthy under the ocean.
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Replenishing oxygen on Mars shouldn't be the hardest problem there. Perchlorates (abundant in the Martian soil) can be heated to release oxygen, and as long as you've got sufficient power you can split the CO2 in the atmosphere.
A lot harder on Luna; regolith consists of reduced minerals and there isn't any significant atmosphere of any kind.
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