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People who want to colonize Mars really need to think smaller first.
They should start by trying to build pleasant domed habitats somewhere marginally habitable like northern Minnesota first.
Then a resort hotel near the peak of Mount Whitney where people can take in amazing views.
Thirdly I'd go for a resort hotel on Mount Foster in Antarctica.
Really if a comfortable enclave in Minnesota for remote tech workers isn't practical, I don't see how we're remotely ready to go to Mars.
Biosphere 2 was a pretty notable boondoggle back in the 1990s (notably involving one Steve Bannon, later famous for other work): they failed to make their "separate biosphere" really work in practice, suffering a bunch of ecosystem imbalances and ultimately having to inject external oxygen. Now, their project was pretty ambitious, and I'm not going to completely fault them for the outcome there, but I do think it's necessary to revisit at perhaps slightly more modest scales to prove out long-term independent habitats elsewhere in the solar system. Other than that, there are a handful of Russian experiments I don't know many details of, the ISS (which sources water from the ground for oxygen, vents CO2, and isn't really "closed") and submarines (which have some documentation, but are "sensitive" for probably-good reasons, and aren't really intended as indefinite habitats WRT food and consumables) and at least one YouTuber trying to demonstrate viability.
Honestly, it's a good place to start. And I'm not sure you need a dome either: in theory your long-term space habitat should probably survive with just electrical power. It's really not clear what the smallest "functional" biosphere is, especially once you start leveraging technology ("why yes, we do pump all the CO2 out of the habitat and into the greenhouse to improve plant growth"). There is some fuzziness about "fully closed-loop" too, but let's assume you don't need to maintain the tools themselves indefinitely to start with. I can't imagine $BILLIONAIRE (or NASA, even) couldn't fund a serious project with some graduate students, equipment, and sealed space the size of maybe a studio apartment.
A Martian settlement would not be a sealed system without inputs or outputs, so the example of the biosphere projects is less relevant than, say, the ISS.
There is presumably some point, which admittedly might be beyond Mars settlement, but I suspect isn't fully, at which a fully closed system becomes viable. For the ISS, it's easy enough to ship up food, oxygen (water) and replacement parts with a couple of months notice. For Mars, those timelines get longer and it is at least worth considering whether you need a full set of replacement parts, or the equivalent of raw materials and a machine shop (common on larger oceangoing ships), or whether a closed-loop environmental system (CO2->oxygen + calories->CO2) makes sense. I'll acknowledge it might not, but a Mars settlement needs to be self-sufficient for at least a few years without Earthside supplies.
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This doesn't make sense to me. Building and operating resort hotels is largely orthogonal to colonization settlement, especially where (as in the case of Mount Whitney and Antarctica) the insurmountable obstacles are legal, not technological.
Any real attempt to build a semi-permanent Mars base would have larger political, legal, and financial problems. You can't throw in the towel in the face of a much smaller problem and expect to make it.
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No thanks, you can conquer nature, but the Somalians are going to cause a problem.
It's not a mountain but there is a year round staffed south pole base. Maybe a resort would be nice but only whales with big money would be able to afford it.
There actually is a commercial resort in Antarctica. Going by the rates, they look comparable to about what you'd have to pay to climb Mt Everest.
Not something I'd spend money on, though I'm not sure how it would rank in terms of whale territory.
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