Why does anyone do anything? Some people obviously just got really into the idea of sailing to the islands.

Right now there are people in the world that are super into the idea of going to Mars. There’s no reason why anyone has to do it, but they’re into the idea of it and they’ll find whatever rationale they need to explain the desire.

> Some people obviously just got really into the idea of sailing to the islands.

Not to be argumentative, but why would we think that the Polynesians knew that Hawaii (as one example) was out there in the middle of the vast Pacific.

Whereas we know Mars exists and we know how to find it if we want to try to go there.

Perhaps they just were willing to gamble that surely there must be other islands out there like the ones they were inhabiting.

  But why, some say, the Moon? Why choose this as our goal? And they may well ask, why climb the highest mountain? Why, 35 years ago, fly the Atlantic? Why does Rice play Texas? We choose to go to the Moon. We choose to go to the Moon... We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard; because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one we intend to win, and the others, too.

  - JKF, 1962

There are always going to be people whose reason is “because we can”. Going to Mars has, on the scale of a human lifetime, only recently become vaguely feasible. As someone who works in STEM, I’m generally on the side of new technologies unlocking things, though I don’t doubt that population and environmental shifts in the home territory can tip things over from a few crazy dreamers to a more coordinated expansion.

We're going to Mars because of rainfall patterns. The anthropologists of the future will peice together clues and come to the same conclusion.

"Why was there a massive migration to Mars starting in 2050? More importantly why did every wave of settlers die out almost immediately"?