Pochacco: Sure it’s more hospitable. For that matter, so is Bermuda. Let’s just put more people there. You seem to think that the sole purpose of this is to find real estate. It’s not. There’s plenty of that on Earth, and will be for a long, long time.
Seriously, we’re talking in the context of allowing humans to live somewhere OFF EARTH. Why go off Earth? Lots of reasons. One, for the sake of exploration. Healthy societies need common goals. Two, to protect humanity from being wiped out in a cataclysm. Right now, if a planet-killing asteroid hits us, or we have a runaway greenhouse effect, or some other natural disaster befalls us, we could lose the human race. Establishing self-supporting colonies off the planet reduces that risk tremendously.
Finally, the reason to go off-planet is to gain resources and find places to manufacture things we can’t do here. In the case of a space colony, imagine a university with 5,000 people in space. It has its own telescope (better than Hubble!), an engineering department that specializes in zero-g manufacturing research, biology departments that study the effects of low gravity on biological processes, environmental and geology departments that study the Earth, etc. The place pays for itself by renting time on its telescope, by selling patents for new processes, by providing tourist living space, and by manufacturing and servicing satellites and inbound/outbound deep space traffic. It might even manufacture solar power satellites and sell power to Earth.
Once we are comfortable living and working in space, a lot of things become possible. Running low on steel here on earth? Grab a metallic asteroid, spin it in a magnetic field, and let inductive currents melt it. Now draw off the slag and discard it, and you have a solid sphere containing more metal than we could mine on Earth in a decade. Haul it back to Earth, and you’ve just made yourself a trillion dollars or so to fund your next resource grab.
We can’t do that now, because it’s far too expensive to haul all of the equipment off of Earth. But if you have a space colony, you build everything you need in orbit, using mass drivers on the moon to launch raw materials up to the colony for a tiny fraction of what it would cost to launch them from Earth.
This is why I think colonies are a better prospect than terraforming Mars. There’s really no reason to do it. Let’s say that Mars became warmer and had a breathable atmosphere. So what? What are we going to do with it? It’s still not likely to be prime real estate, and we’ve got plenty of better real estate on Earth (and the fears of massive population explosions on Earth turned out to be wrong).
But space colonies would be commercially useful, and that means there is much greater incentive to build them. And the difficulty of doing so is orders of magnitude smaller. We could build them today. If we had the incentive to do so, we could have a million people living in orbit within 100 years. We could have the first colony up and running in 30 or 40 years. The recent discovery of water on the moon makes this much easier.
The first step along the way would be to build a support colony on the moon. This would prove out manufacturing techniques using lunar materials, and their job would be to build the first mass-driver to launch materials into Earth orbit. They might even do the refining and specialized construction work on the moon, and ship finished goods up to the colonies in orbit. Eventually, these things become self-replicating, and then you geat an exponential growth curve happening.
And once we had a thriving ring of space colonies in orbit, that can manufacture complex devices and has ready access to raw materials, then you can use those as your jumping off point to colonize the rest of the solar system for a fraction of what it would cost to do so from Earth.
) into them. Engineering - - canals toward the equator. Elegance - - bio-engineered plants (lichens or whatever). If you can increase the atmosphere and free up some liquid water, then you’ll have a foothold to work with. But it ain’t gunna be easy.