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Notes -
Understatement of the millennium.
People will say “humanity needs to become an interplanetary civilization to avoid extinction”, even though Mars…
The idea Mars would be some outpost of a catastrophe on Earth is farcical. We could fuck up the ecosystem good and proper, and at least Earth would still have gravity and a magnetic shield—we have absolutely no ability to create a sustainable biosphere on Mars.
While I don't think Mars is good for anything long term except for raw material for a Dyson Swarm, you can quite easily create an artificial magnetosphere:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0094576521005099
Or
https://medium.com/our-space/an-artificial-martian-magnetosphere-fd3803ea600c
And fusion, let alone fission, makes the lack of solar power more of a nuisance than anything else. We can't rely on it anyway, at least in the further parts of the Solar System.
Re: energy, I've become fond of interorbital kinetic exchanges, partly because they make the otherwise stupidly costly outer planets potentially profitable, but also because you're basically taking natural flywheels and converting them into power / propulsion / etc. Is it still hydroelectric if the water is contained in Uranian plastic dropped from an altitude of 20AU?
Luna tends to get treated as the stepping stone, and Mars the destination, but it seems more likely that Luna becomes a major center for industry/population, and Mars is the stepping stone to the rest of the system. At least Luna is close enough for a meaningful relationship with Earth.
If I may digress briefly, latest models of the history of the Solar System seem to find a significant role for most planets in the backstory to habitable Earth. The complex dance of the giants shaped the inner system in detail, and Venus dropped Theia onto the Earth to create the Moon. Conspicuously missing from all this, though, is Mercury, which also conspicuously is often relegated to an enormous materials depot in speculations on futurism. Now, the anthropic principal doesn't require that everything we see be an important aspect of our prolonged ability to see it, but if there were a simpler way, it would seem more likely that we'd be in that simpler system, so I can't but wonder at the anthropic implications of Solar System architecture that we've yet to discover.
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Oh boy, you hit a pet peeve of mine.
There are plenty of nigh-insurmountable obstacles to terraforming Mars, but the lack of a magnetic field is really not one of them. Solar wind needed hundreds of millions of years to erode Mars' atmosphere to its current levels, you might as well say the Suez Canal was a waste of resources because plate tectonics will close the Straits of Gibraltar and dry up the Mediterranean 600 thousand years in the future.
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