I actually think that science fiction has done everyone a disservice by presenting escaping to another planet as a remotely feasible near-term solution to problems on Earth.
Like, I’m sorry, but if terraforming Mars is an option then why can’t we just terraform the Earth?
(I mean, this last bit isn’t actually a great argument, because a lot of techniques proposed for terraforming involve such things as smashing asteroids into planets, blocking out their view of the sun for decades at a time, or seeding the entire planet’s surface with novel extremophile bacteria, which would be unthinkable on Earth; but the point still stands! It would be vastly easier to restore Earth to a healthy climate than to make Mars even as habitable as the peak of Mount Everest)
As Mars is fuck-off far away, it’s really expensive to send even a robot the size of a compact car there, half of all uncrewed missions there fail, and we don’t even know how to land a crewed one yet.
They’re talking about a city on Mars. We don’t even have a city on Antartica! And Antartica is 10000x more hospitable, because it at least has breathable air and readily available water. And Antartica can have an actual supply chain feeding the necessary stuff to it rather than needing to plan rockets. But no one ever suggests colonising Antartica to solve overpopulation, because its so obviously inhospitable and it would cost so much to set up a city there. Still so much better than Mars.
Or cities floating on the ocean! Or cities in the sahara desert! Or cities in orbit! These are all terrible, terrible ideas, but each one is far more feasible and practical than a colony on Mars is.
Did you see anything about how china returned Przwalskis horses to it’s steppe and effectively halted desertification bc keystone species can do stuff like that? Technically terra forming, perfectly doable to engineer/ restore all sorts of earth ecosystems, and SO MUCH MORE FEASIBLE than anything that can be done on Mars.
