When will normal citizens be able to settle on Mars?

No bonus points for me, I’m afraid.

Mars colonization will have to wait until we can synthesize an earth-like environment for an extended period and a growing population.

I think it might be easier to colonize Titan, the moon of Saturn’s, since it already has significant supplies of water.

How are you defining “normal citizens”?

@janbb Anyone without restriction.

I think it will be two hundred years or more.

It’s expensive, with zero return on investment. We’ll simply be shooting money into space. So it will take a long time to send enough people and material over there to build a self-sustaining colony.

@jaytkay The advantage is to be free of persecution. A new start.

Who the hell would want to live on Mars anyway? No thanks, I’ll take the cyanide pill if I my environmental choice is the red planet. I need to live in alpine territory, not a red desert scape.

Never.

We will all be dead and gone before ever reaching that point. The best you could hope for would be a survivalist contingent sent out before we kill ourselves off. And, they would not be what I call a “normal” citizen grouping.

If you’re being persecuted on Earth, how would you get the cash together to travel to Mars and build a habitat?

Many hundreds of years from now..?

I did see on a Mars documentary that we now have the technology to ‘terraform’ (or whatever you call it) the Martian atmosphere to one that would be suitable for humans, but it would take some 50 years to do so. Basically the same thing they were doing on the planet LV-426 in the film Aliens. The only thing stopping us from doing so is the trillions of dollars someone would have to be willing to throw away spend on the project.

Humans won’t be living on Mars for probably at least…500 years, would be my guess. If we’re even still a viable species at that point, of course.

There is thing called One Mars Project who plan to send human to Mars in 2023. Check their website here http://www.mars-one.com/en/

My people already have. We’ve begun scouting Earth too. The “event” will be soon and it will be glorious! As long as that pesky blue box and The Doctor don’t show up that is…

Not for a hell of a long time, is my guess. Currently, we haven’t been further than the moon, and getting that done today is still an ordeal. We have satellites and devices that can go really far yeah, but no current technology, so far, that allows us to colonize any planet, or moons. It also doesn’t help that society’s current advent is making money, not colonization. This might happen faster were our energies put into it. How much funding does space exploration get these days, anyway?

If all countries stop spending money for the military tomorrow, I’d say 15 years if all of this money goes into this venture.

It has been a year. I hear rumors of one way trips to colonize Mars.

Once they complete the asylum.