Funny, for me it's the opposite: I get extremely irritated when Musk or someone else says the future of humanity is to colonize Mars. If you think you can turn a bare rock into a livable planet, please do something about Earth and global warming first.

He made an electric car the into the best selling car in the world, and is building the largest solar cell factory in the US. What more should he personally be doing about global warming?

> please do something about Earth and global warming first.

Through Tesla and his prominent advocacy for green energies, you don’t think his doing that?

Planets are spaceships. Mars is a dead planet either because its shields[0][1] were disabled, or it never had shields to begin with.

So the first thing we'd want to do is activate a magnetosphere on Mars. I rarely see anyone talking about that[2].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Van_Allen_radiation_belt

[1] https://www.nasa.gov/science-research/heliophysics/real-mart...

[2] https://astrobiology.nasa.gov/news/how-to-give-mars-an-atmos...

Colonizing the moon first is not a bad idea and ultimately we do need to find some way of (in the far future) mitigating the sun's expansion, whether it's moving to another planet or something

Mars is just really far. You can send lots of robots. Human beings is a tougher thing