I am certain that we will have colonies on Mars. The perils of space travel almost demand that if we decide to go there at all, it will be all or nothing because you don't undertake a 500+ day round trip just to stay there a week!!!

We will have to START with a self-sustaining colony, perhaps with the hardware sent there and assembled telerobotically from Earth...or something. For the foreseeable future millennia, all we HAVE is the solar system to explore first hand. There is a lot of interesting real estate in our solar system. In a few centuries we will have outposts everywhere.

Return to Ask the Astronomer