I believe travel to Mars is important for a number of reasons. There are two sets of reasons to go to Mars; the immediate, and the long-term. The immediate reasons are simple, although often unconvincing. A trip to Mars might draw as its immediate goals the two goals which got us to the moon, 1.) to prove to the U.S.’s enemies that the U.S. has more advanced technology and capabilities than any other nation on earth, and 2.) to undertake scientific research. The second reason listed does not bear much scrutiny, however, due to the fact that the U.S. and other nations have already sent probes and rovers to Mars which are able to preform a satisfying amount of research on Mars without endangering the lives of anybody in the process. The first reason listed, although more legitimate than the second, is difficult to conceive of as legitimate enough to justify the costs of a Mars mission. The U.S. currently considers itself as unrivaled in terms of technology and military power. The political landscape that drove NASA to the moon in the 1960’s and 70’s just doesn’t exist in the 21st century. A third conceivable reason seems the most legitimate. Mars’s natural resources, sparse though they are, currently seem to me to be the most legitimate immediate justification for a Mars colony. But even this seems dubious. Mars has no oil, no lumber, no foodstuffs.
The most legitimate reason of all lies outside the range of immediate reasons to go to Mars, and is the reason which Elon Musk himself most frequently cites. While the ultimate concept is not my own, I have developed my own way of understanding and rationalizing the idea that going to Mars is important in ensuring that the human race has as long a history as humanly possible (pardon the pun). The human race is used to thinking about the past in historic, rather than geologic terms. For most people 2,000 years is a long time, 4,000 years is a very long time, and so on. This way of thinking is understandable, only around 6,000 years ago, human civilization as we know it emerged in what is today Iraq. But if the human race wants to survive for as long as it is capable, we ought to start considering the concept of becoming first an interplanetary, and then later an interstellar species. Geologic history, the history of the Earth that began over 4 billion years ago, is full of catastrophic events. For much of this history life, let alone human life or human civilization, did not exist. During the relatively short time in which life did exist, extinction events were frequent. The mass extinction that whipped out the dinosaurs is well known, but far from the only extinction event. So in geologic terms, if the human race and human civilization is to survive for much more than the relatively puny 6,000 years it has already existed, it only makes sense to diversify our environment. Right now all our eggs are in the basket of earth. A massive catastrophe in geologic terms is nearly as common as a famine is in historic terms, so if the human race intends to have a long, prosperous and meaningful existence, it makes sense to spread to other worlds to ensure our survival beyond our current concept of historic time and into geologic time.