One consistent thing I've learned in life is that you do not grow by staying in your comfort zone. You grow by going outside it.
Take exercise for example. If you can run ten miles up hill, the ordinary physical exertion of climbing a flight of stairs becomes trivial. But go without exercise for a long time and walking from your front door to your car starts to feel tiresome.
If we can live on Mars, then we can fucking live on Mars. If we can actually thrive there? If we can get so good at living there that we actually can enjoy a decent standard of living on Mars?
At that point there would be no excuse. There'd be no problem here on Earth that we should have any trouble solving, because we are badass enough to live on Mars.
That alone is one reason I can think of to go. There are others, and some get into areas like evolutionary information theory. The short version would be to say that I think there are things that arise from contact with a novel environment that are necessary to stimulate innovation and invention, and I have doubts about whether it is possible to innovate without that contact. Can a brain in a vat think? Being without a frontier seems a bit like that at the species scale.
What you need to argue is not that humanity needs challenges, but rather that this specific challenge is the one to aim for because it is the most beneficial for our species.
Compare colonizing Mars colonizing the sea floor, and Mars honestly doesn't seem like a great priority: there are quite similar air supply and pressure integrity challenges (in that they need to be accounted for) and potential financial gain is much more easy to realize.
Or compare colonizing Mars with the Millennium goals, the latter have obviously much more direct impact for humanity than founding a space colony that will inevitably rebel and wage space war for a few decades, which basically all sci-fi tells us will happen.
It's not by any means the only challenge out there, but it's a particularly good one. It's multi-dimensional, drawing upon virtually every human talent imaginable: technical, social, aesthetic, scientific. It's long-term, complex and multi-faceted, and incredibly tangible. Anyone can look up in the sky and find Mars. In human mythology heaven is almost always "up"; it seems to resonate with both ancient and modern mythology. I can't think of many other challenges that are as rich as this one.
Take exercise for example. If you can run ten miles up hill, the ordinary physical exertion of climbing a flight of stairs becomes trivial. But go without exercise for a long time and walking from your front door to your car starts to feel tiresome.
If we can live on Mars, then we can fucking live on Mars. If we can actually thrive there? If we can get so good at living there that we actually can enjoy a decent standard of living on Mars?
At that point there would be no excuse. There'd be no problem here on Earth that we should have any trouble solving, because we are badass enough to live on Mars.
That alone is one reason I can think of to go. There are others, and some get into areas like evolutionary information theory. The short version would be to say that I think there are things that arise from contact with a novel environment that are necessary to stimulate innovation and invention, and I have doubts about whether it is possible to innovate without that contact. Can a brain in a vat think? Being without a frontier seems a bit like that at the species scale.